1 About Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8

This chapter provides an overview of Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8 (UEK 8) and contains important information about this major release.

Note:

Upgrading from an Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Developer Preview release to its later official version isn't supported. If you're running the Developer Preview version, you must reinstall the official UEK release upon its general availability.

UEK 8 is initially released with the 6.12.0-0.20.20 version of the kernel. The kernel's source code is available through a public git source code repository at https://github.com/oracle/linux-uek.

The following is a general description of the scope of support for UEK 8:

  • The kernel is developed, built, and tested on the 64-bit Arm (aarch64), Intel® 64-bit x86_64, and AMD 64-bit x86_64 architectures and is based on the mainline Linux kernel version 6.12 (LTS).

  • UEK 8 is made available for installation on the latest Oracle Linux 9 update releases.

  • In UEK 8, more features are enabled to provide support for key functional requirements and patches are applied to improve performance and optimize the kernel for use on Oracle operating environments. Note that Oracle actively monitors upstream check-ins and applies critical bug and security fixes to UEK 8.

  • Although UEK 8 uses the same versioning model as the mainline Linux kernel version, it's possible that some applications might not understand the 6.12.0 versioning scheme. Note, however, that regular Linux applications are usually neither aware of nor affected by Linux kernel version numbers.

  • A version of UEK 8 that enables 64k pages is available for 64-bit Arm (aarch64) platforms for Oracle Linux 9 and later. The kernel-uek64k package is available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Arm compute shapes only. Use of this kernel outside of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is only available as a technical preview.