The following features included in the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 are still under development, but are made available for testing and evaluation purposes.
DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device)
A shared-nothing, synchronously replicated block device (RAID1 over network), designed to serve as a building block for high availability (HA) clusters. It requires a cluster manager (for example, pacemaker) for automatic failover. (This technology preview feature is available for Oracle Linux 6 only.)
DTrace
DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework that was initially developed for the Oracle Solaris operating system and which is being ported to Linux by Oracle. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs in real time. DTrace feature previews are published as a separate set of kernel packages in UEK R2. DTrace support is integrated with the kernel in the UEK Release 3 (UEK R3) distribution. (This technology preview feature is available for Oracle Linux 6 only.)
Kernel module signing facility
Applies cryptographic signature checking to modules on module load, checking the signature against a ring of public keys compiled into the kernel. GPG is used to do the cryptographic work and determines the format of the signature and key data.
Linux Containers (lxc)
Based on the Linux Cgroups and name spaces functionality, containers allow you to safely and securely run multiple applications or instances of an operating system on a single host without risking them interfering with each other. Containers are lightweight and resource-friendly, which saves both rack space and power. In order to get started with containers, you need to install the
lxcpackage, which is included in the package repository of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. (This technology preview feature is available for Oracle Linux 6 only.)Transcendent memory
Transcendent Memory (tmem for short) provides a new approach for improving the utilization of physical memory in a virtualized environment by claiming underutilized memory in a system and making it available where it is most needed. From the perspective of an operating system, tmem is fast pseudo-RAM of indeterminate and varying size that is useful primarily when real RAM is in short supply. To learn more about this technology and its use cases, see the Transcendent Memory project page at https://oss.oracle.com/projects/tmem/.