Days after Oracle celebrated their RHEL-based Oracle Linux distribution turning 20 years old, today they announced Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.2 “UEK 8.2” as their alternative to the RHEL-clone kernel with Oracle Linux.
The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is Oracle’s premier Linux kernel option for Oracle Linux with additional features and other extra hardening and capabilities compared to what is the RHEL-compatible kernel version. With UEK 8 Update 2 they are still using a Linux 6.12 LTS base for their kernel while presumably it will be with UEK9 where they switch over to the latest Linux 6.18 LTS branch.
Beyond pulling in the newer upstream Linux 6.12 changes of latter point releases, UEK 8.2 brings enhancements to confidential computing with various Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) patches backported, XFS online repair is validated atop this newest UEK kernel build, and there are other memory protection and diagnostic improvements.
Select drivers have also been pulled into UEK 8.2 from newer Linux kernel versions, such as backports of the AMD HSMP driver for EPYC servers from Linux 6.18 as well as updated drivers for i40e, idxd, ixgbe, lpfc, and mlx5.
Downloads and more details on the updated Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8 version for Oracle Linux can be found via the Oracle Linux blog. UEK kernel source code is available from GitHub.
