Important Operating Note

When using the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) with Oracle Linux 6 or Oracle Linux 7, you should perform a Yum update to obtain the latest UEK R4 release updates. Oracle Server X7-2 requires kernel version 4.1.12-94.5.7 or later.

For more information and instructions for updating the UEK for Oracle Linux, refer to the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel web site at: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E93554_01/ .

Important Operating Note

On systems running Linux with Intel network interface cards or LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM) controllers, if MMIO memory access is set to strict access in the Linux kernel (iomem=strict or as part of the kernel build configuration) you will see the following message in syslog/dmeg when running the Oracle Hardware Management Pack fwupdate tool:

kernel: Program fwupdate tried to access /dev/mem between
c4a00000->c4a01000. (Address may vary)

This message is expected and should not cause an issue with the operation of the operating system. There will be one message each time fwupdate is run and the kernel is in strict MMIO access mode.

However, when the kernel is running in this mode, fwupdate will not be able to access Intel-based network controllers to either list information or update firmware.

For more information on this issue including a workaround, see the "Linux MMIO Access Settings Can Affect fwupdate Commands On Intel Network Controllers" section in the Oracle Hardware Management Pack 2.4 Server CLI Tools User's Guide at: https://www.oracle.com/goto/ohmp/docs .

Bug ID: 25702796

Issue: When installing Oracle Linux 7 Update 3 on a system with an NVMe storage device (either a storage drive or add-in PCIe card) with larger than 2 TB capacity, the install might fail due to a Linux kernel panic. This might appear during install as a stack trace on the console. The install process will hang without warning or any other symptom, and the installation will not complete.

Affected Software: Oracle Linux 7 Update 3

Workaround: To avoid this panic during the install, select manual partitioning when configuring the NVMe device storage and ensure that any partition larger than 2 TB in size uses the ext4 file system instead of XFS. If you do an automated install using a kickstarter configuration file, ensure your storage partitions on NVMe devices use the ext4 file system, if the partitions are larger than 2 TB in size.