New version of Oracle Linux 7.7 released with RHEL 7.7 features and more

Oracle Linux is a Red Hat-based GNU / Linux distribution, repackaged and distributed by Oracle, available under the GNU (GPL). This Linux distribution is used in products from Oracle, the company that took over the Sun Microsystems business

The week Oracle announced the launch of the new version of your Linux distribution industry Oracle Linux 7.7, which is created on the basis of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 package base. In addition to the RHEL kernel package (3.10.0-1062).

This new version of Oracle Linux includes the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 5 kernel (4.14.35-1902.3.2), released a few months ago. Kernel sources, including breakdowns into individual patches, are available from the Oracle Git public repository.

The Kernel is positioned as an alternative to the regular Kernel package provided in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and provides a number of advanced features, such as DTrace integration and improved Btrfs support. Besides the kernel, the functionality of Oracle Linux 7.7 is similar to RHEL 7.7.

Oracle Linux 7.7 Key Features

This new version Oracle Linux 7.7, as mentioned at the beginning is based on RHEL 7.7 so almost all the previous changes mentioned and some of the following are also characteristic of RHEL 7.7

In Oracle Linux 7.7 NetworkManager adds the ability to set routing rules by source addressn (policy routing) and support for VLAN filtering on network bridge interfaces.

For containers and images in UBI format (Universal base image), se added support for scanning content to comply with the SCAP Safety Guide.

Besides that Btrfs support has been deprecated in RHEL kernel (To use Btrfs, you must use UEK R4 and UEK R5 kernels). MySQL packages that need to be downloaded from a separate yum repository have been removed from this new version.

For the graphical installer, definitions have been added to enable simultaneous multithreading mode (SMT) in the system and the output of a corresponding warning.

As well added DAX support (direct access to FS bypassing page cache without using block device level) in ext4 and XFS, as well as OverlayFS support and an updated driver for NVMe / FC QLogic qla2xxxx.

For the system packaging, the new updated versions of the NSS (Network Security Services) packages are highlighted, scap-security-guide 0.1.43, shadow-utils 4.6, gcc-library 8.3.1, linuxptp 2.0, tuned 2.11 , chrony 3.4. Python3 packages were added with the Python 3.6 interpreter.

For testing on the UEK R5 kernel, experimental features are proposed:

• EL being able to import and export containers in Systemd
• Some designs for creating block device storage and object storage for pNFS
• An HMM (heterogeneous memory management) subsystem for using devices with their own memory management units
• Non-IOMMU mode
• Cisco VIC InfiniBand Drivers and ibusnic_verbs
• support for SR-IOV (Single Root I / O Virtualization) in qlcnic driver
• Support for TNC (Trusted Network Connect), support for input / output using multiple queues (scsi-mq, Multi-queue) in SCSI
• plugin to manage storage arrays via the libStorageMgmt API.

Download Oracle Linux 7.7

Oracle Linux can be downloaded for free from Oracle's electronic delivery service (Oracle's E-delivery service), and may be freely redistributed.

If you are interested in being able to download the new version of Oracle Linux to be able to test it on your computer or in a virtual machine.

You just have to go to the official website of the project and in the download section we will find the link to download the system, or if you prefer, I'll leave the link here. The link to power request the download is this.

It is important to mention that to download without restrictions you must make a free prior registration, with which you can later continue accessing subsequent releases.

The 4,7 GB installation iso image is distributed for the x86_64 and ARM64 (aarch64) architectures.