Oracle Linux 9 Reaches GA With Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R7

Oracle Linux 9 as Oracle's offshoot of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is now available in general availability (GA) form. Besides being based on RHEL9, Oracle Linux 9 offers up their latest "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" for extra kernel features while also continuing to produce a Red Hat Compatible Kernel flavor as well.

Oracle Linux 9.0 GA is available for those looking at RHEL9 alternatives. This follows their developer preview from last month and AlmaLinux 9.0 that debuted at the end of May. RHEL 9 makes use of GCC 11 as the default system compiler, contains various cloud and virtualization improvements, RPM Zstd compression for packages, crypto improvements, and more.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 uses a Linux 5.14 based kernel while Oracle Linux 9.0 with its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7 is onto a Linux 5.15-based kernel with Linux 5.15 being the current upstream LTS series. UEK R7 offers up various security improvements, VirtualBox Shared Folder support is handled natively with the UEK kernel, better Btrfs support, and other additions for that newer kernel.

As for why Oracle Linux 9 should be used, Oracle even published a "why switch?" portion as part of their Oracle Linux 9.0 GA announcement. They talk up Oracle Linux as being free to use and easy to download, 100% ABI compatibility with RHEL, ISVs and IHVs working closely with Oracle, consistent following of RHEL releases, no login or authentication needed to access the Oracle Linux yum server, and Oracle's support subscriptions that are optionally available.

More details on the Oracle Linux 9.0 GA release via the Oracle Blog.