Oracle releases Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8 (UEK 8)
Oracle has released version 8 of its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), a custom Linux kernel built for Oracle Linux. UEK 8 includes updates to memory management, better file system support, faster networking, and improvements for specific hardware platforms. It also pulls in changes from the wider Linux community.
UEK 8 is designed to handle heavy workloads. It builds on the combination of Oracle Linux and UEK to support large enterprise systems. That includes setups using Oracle Database, Oracle Exadata, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), across distributed environments.
“This is our eighth release of UEK, and I think it’s the best one yet,” said Greg Marsden, senior VP of Linux software development, Oracle. “In addition to bringing in significant improvements like memory folios, UEK 8 is built on the foundation of the UEK-next project. For the past year, UEK-next has allowed both Oracle and our customers to test out the latest upstream features that are now production- and enterprise-ready with UEK 8. UEK has been around nearly as long as upstream stable kernels, and it continues to push the boundaries of Linux innovation and deliver the performance and stability that businesses depend on—while keeping Linux open and free.”
What’s new in UEK 8
UEK 8 brings big changes to memory management. It uses new data structures like folios and Maple Tree to handle memory more efficiently and boost performance. For Arm-based systems in Oracle Cloud, users can now choose a larger 64K memory page size for better performance with certain workloads.
File system and storage improvements include faster, more secure I/O with updated io_uring and better handling of large writes in XFS, Ext4, and Btrfs. XFS can now repair itself online without downtime, and NFS gets better support for sparse files.
Networking is faster too. UEK 8 adds BIG TCP for better data transfer over IPv6 and updates core networking for improved performance with many connections. The Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) gets a new memory allocator to improve reliability.
For security, UEK 8 supports Intel’s SGX2, which helps protect sensitive data by keeping it in isolated memory areas. This is useful for both on-premises and cloud systems.
Get UEK 8
UEK 8 is available for installation starting with Oracle Linux 9 Update 5.
The kernel’s source code is available through a public git source code repository. It’s based on the latest long-term stable Linux kernel and works on 64-bit Intel, AMD (x86-64), and Arm (aarch64) systems.