Oracle has released the second functional update for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R6, 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 6 is based on the Linux 5.4 kernel (UEK R5 was based on the 4.14 kernel), which is updated with new features, optimizations and fixes, and has been tested for compatibility with most applications running on RHEL, and is specifically optimized to work with industrial software. and Oracle hardware. UEK R6 kernel installation and src packages are prepared for Oracle Linux 7.x and 8.x.
Major changes:
- A new slab memory controller (slab memory controller) has been added for cgroups, which is notable for moving slab accounting from the memory page level to the kernel object level, which makes it possible to share slab pages in different cgroups, instead of dedicating separate slab caches for each cgroup. The proposed approach makes it possible to increase the efficiency of using slab, reduce the size of memory used for slab by up to 50%, significantly reduce the overall memory consumption of the kernel, and reduce memory fragmentation.
- For Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx devices, a new vpda driver has been added with support for the vDPA (vHost Data Path Acceleration) framework, which allows you to use hardware acceleration for I/O based on VirtIO in virtual machines.
- From the Linux 5.9 kernel, improvements related to support for NVMe devices have been carried over.
- Ported fixes and improvements for Btrfs, CIFS, ext4, NFS, OCFS2 and XFS file systems.
- Updated drivers including lpfc 12.8.0.5 (Broadcom Emulex LightPulse Fiber Channel SCSI) supporting 256 Gigabit mode for SCSI Fiber Channel, mpt3sas 36.100.00.00 (LSI MPT Fusion SAS 3.0), qla2xxx 0.02.00.103-k (QLogic Fiber Channel HBA ).
- Added experimental support for VPN Wireguard implemented at the kernel level.
- NFS adds experimental support for the ability to directly copy files between servers, as defined in the NFS 4.2 specification
- The task scheduler has implemented an experimental feature to limit the parallel execution of important tasks on different CPU cores, to block leak channels associated with the use of a shared cache in the CPU.
Source: opennet.ru