Oracle Now Supports Btrfs RAID5/6 On Their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel

Besides incorporating the RHEL 7.4 changes from Red Hat into their recent Oracle Linux update, their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) has received a few updates of its own.

A Phoronix reader wrote in this morning to point out that Oracle is now supporting RAID 5/6 modes on Oracle Linux with UEK. It was just with Linux 4.12 that RAID 5/6 support was fixed or at least mostly, and that has now been backported to the Oracle Linux 7 Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. The Btrfs RAID5 and RAID6 modes were previously considered in bad shape.

The UEK release notes mention, "Continued improvements in scalability, performance and stability for Btrfs are key features of this latest release. Btrfs now includes RAID 5 and RAID 6 support."

Aside from Btrfs, UEK is also now supporting OverlayFS, NFS 4.2 client support, EXT4 and XFS updates, and more.

Oracle appears content on continuing to support Btrfs for their Linux offerings while upstream Red Hat is abandoning their Btrfs hopes in favor of developing Stratis. With Solaris dieing, it's a pity though Oracle isn't trying to push ZFS into Oracle Linux in an official capacity over Btrfs.

The latest UEK kernel changes can be found at Oracle.com/technetwork.