Oracle has released the fifth functional update for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R5, positioned for use in the Oracle Linux distribution as an alternative to the regular kernel package from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The kernel is available for x86_64 and ARM64 (aarch64) architectures. The source texts of the kernel, including the breakdown into individual patches, are published in the Oracle public Git repository.
Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 5 is based on Linux 4.14 (UEK R4 was based on 4.1 and UEK R6 was based on 5.4), which includes new features, optimizations, fixes, and has been tested and optimized for most applications running on RHEL to work with industrial software and Oracle hardware. Installation and src packages with the UEK R5U5 kernel are prepared for Oracle Linux 7 (there are no obstacles to using this kernel in similar versions of RHEL, CentOS and Scientific Linux).
Key improvements:
- The code responsible for cleaning the memory page cache in the KVM hypervisor has been optimized, which has improved the performance of large guest systems and reduced their startup time.
- Bug fixes and code improvements for btrfs, CIFS, ext4, NFS, OCFS2, and XFS file systems.
- RDMA improves the performance of RDS (Reliable Datagram Sockets) failover/failback switches in case of failures. Added new RDS debugging tools that trace with eBPF and DTrace.
- Added /sys/kernel/security/lockdown interface to securityfs to manage Secure Boot lockdown mode, which restricts root access to the kernel and blocks UEFI Secure Boot bypass paths.
- Updated device drivers, including new driver versions for LSI MPT Fusion SAS 3.0, BCM573xx, Intel QuickData, Intel i10nm EDAC, Marvell PHY, Microsoft Hyper-V and QLogic Fiber Channel HBA.
Source: opennet.ru