Oracle Linux is the only recommended Linux distribution for Oracle applications.
After the official launch by Red Hat of the new version of RHEL 9.2 Oracle has done its relevant work and has announced the launch of the new version of your Linux distribution "OracleLinux 9.2" based on and fully compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 package databases.
In addition to the RHEL kernel packages (based on the 4.18 and 5.14 kernels), Oracle Linux offers its own Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 7 Update 1 (UEK R7U1) based on the Linux 5.15 kernel and optimized for Oracle industrial hardware and software .
Major New Features in Oracle Linux 9.2
In this new version of Oracle Linux 9.2 that is presented, it is highlighted that ships with kernel versions 5.14.0-284.11.1(Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK)) and kernel-uek-5.15.0-101.103.2(Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Version 7 Update 1 (UEK R7u1)).
Of the novelties that are presented in this release, we can find that Oracle Linux now includes offline update with the command "dnf offline-upgrade". This change is intended to enable offline upgrades to help protect a system during upgrades by performing package installations after a reboot.
Another of the changes that stands out are the performance improvements around security for SMB server by including samba version 4.17.5 which has improvements when working with high metadata workloads. Also notable is the addition of a –json option to the smbstatus command to display status information in JSON format.
In addition to this, it also stands out powertop which was updated to version 2.15 with notable features and changes that include general fixes and stability improvements, As well as compatibility improvements with Ryzen processors and Kaby Lake platforms, Lake Field, Alder Lake N and Raptor Lake platform functionality was also enabled and Ice Lake NNPI and Meteor Lake desktop and mobile functionality were enabled.
Of the other changes that stand out of this new version:
- Tuna Command is updated for better parsing of command line arguments
- NetworkManager updated to version 1.42.2
- BPF functionality updated to Upstream Linux 6.0, all BPF features that depend on the BPF Type Format (BTF) for kernel modules are enabled, including the use of BPF springboards for tracing.
- The DNF API includes an unload_plugins function so that you can unload plugins using the API. To use this feature, you must first run init_plugins and then unload_plugins.
- rpm2archive includes a --nocompression option that can prevent compression when unpacking an updated RPM.crony package to version 4.3
- The maximum polling rate increased to 128 messages per second.
- FRRouting updated to version 8.3.1
- Support for existing disk growth within the Stratis pool
- The frrpackage is updated to version 8.3.1. Notable features and changes include:
- New command to manage FRR daemons
New commands related to Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). - The SELinux rules for FRR are included in the frr package to improve integration with SELinux as new features and changes are released.
- Python 3.11 is available
- Git updated to version 2.39.1
- nginx 1.22
Finally it is worth mentioning that the kernel sources, including the breakdown into individual patches, are available in the public Oracle Git repository. Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is installed by default, is positioned as an alternative to the regular RHEL kernel package, and provides a number of advanced features, such as DTrace integration and improved Btrfs support.
Installation iso images are offered for download without restrictions, of 9,8GB and 880MB in size, prepared for x86_64 and ARM64 (aarch64) architectures.
For Oracle Linux, free unlimited access to the yum repository with binary package updates with bug fixes (errata) and security issues is open. Separately maintained repositories with Application Stream and CodeReady Builder package sets are also ready for download.