Oracle News Archives

Oracle has released a developer preview of their forthcoming Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 to Oracle Linux users, the company's spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With Oracle UEK 6, Linux 5.4 serves as the new base.

There's still nothing on Solaris past the v11.4 series, but Oracle is ending out 2019 with a last stable release update for the year.

Oracle has released VM VirtualBox 6.1 with better integration around the public Oracle Cloud, continued work on their new 3D support brought forward in VirtualBox 6.0, user-interface improvements, and much more.

In addition to Oracle having shipped a Solaris update this past week, prior to calling it a weekend their virtualization crew released VirtualBox 6.1 RC1.

While there is no sign of Solaris 11.5 or Solaris.Next (last year was a road-map pointing to Solaris 11.Next in H2'19 or H1'20 that has since been removed), Oracle does continue putting out more updates to the Solaris 11.4 series.

Fresh off the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 at the beginning of November, Oracle is now shipping Oracle Linux 8 Update 1 as their spin of RHEL 8.1 with various changes on top -- including their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" option.

While we normally hear of rewriting code from Python and other scripting languages into C/C++ when its a matter of performance, in the case of Oracle Solaris it was taking old C code and modernizing it in Python 3 to yield a ~17x performance improvement.

Oracle has reaffirmed their "long term commitment to deliver innovation on Oracle Solaris" though it still doesn't look like anything past Solaris 11 will materialize.

While we haven't heard anything yet about Oracle's plans for Solaris post-11.4 whether that means Solaris 11.4 or the reportedly killed Solaris 12, Oracle today did release Solaris 11.4 Stable Release Update 12 as their newest installment for their supported Solaris operating system release.

Back in May we wrote about Oracle's initial plans for introducing an eBPF back-end to GCC 10 to allow this GNU compiler to target this general purpose in-kernel virtual machine. Up to this point LLVM Clang has been the focused compiler for eBPF but those days are numbered with Oracle on Friday pushing out the newest GCC patches.

Based on last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 is now Oracle Linux 7 Update 7 with many of the same changes.

While DTrace prospects for the Linux kernel are no longer viewed as magical or groundbreaking as they once were more than a decade ago, Oracle continues to work on its DTrace port to Linux and extending its reach beyond just their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" for their RHEL-cloned Oracle Linux. Oracle now says they are working towards upstreaming more work as well as getting an eBPF-based implementation for the kernel.

In early May right before the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 we saw the public beta of Oracle Linux 8 while today Oracle Linux 8.0 has been promoted to stable and production ready.

While Oracle backs the VM VirtualBox virtualization software, they increasingly are offering new solutions around KVM virtualization. Hitting general availability (GA) status this week is the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager.

Oracle today announced the general availability release of their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 2 that pairs with their RHEL-derived Oracle Linux for offering a Linux 4.14 based kernel with various features on top.

While Oracle has control of DTrace following their acquisition of Sun Microsystems, it turns out Oracle developers are quite interested in adding eBPF support to the GNU toolchain with GCC support as an alternative to the LLVM-focused path currently relied upon for targeting this in-kernel Linux virtual machine.

One of the areas of Oracle Linux and its "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" that the company continues investing in and differentiating it from upstream RHEL and alternatives is around Ksplice as their means of live kernel patching while Red Hat continues with Kpatch and SUSE with kGraft.

In addition to releasing VirtualBox 6.0, Oracle on Tuesday also released an updated version of their Linux kernel downstream geared for their RHEL-cloned Oracle Linux... Now available is Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 1.

Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.0 is now officially available as a big feature release to end out 2018.

Oracle's VirtualBox 6.0 multi-platform virtualization software continues inching closer to release.

While this year Oracle was successful in getting DTrace working well on Linux assuming you apply their patches or (more easily) using their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel on Oracle Linux, they are looking at enhancing DTrace with the increasingly-used eBPF framework / in-kernel JIT.

Last month Oracle rolled out the public beta of VirtualBox 6.0 though didn't include many user-facing changes. They have now rolled out a second beta that does add in a few more features.

Oracle's Munich developers responsible for maintaining the VirtualBox virtualization software this morning announced the first public test release of the upcoming VirtualBox 6.0.

We've known Red Hat was working on converting the VirtualBox "vboxvideo" DRM/KMS driver to using the atomic APIs for atomic mode-setting to replace the legacy APIs and now those patches are out there.

Java 11 (JDK 11) is officially out today as the first Java Long-Term Support (LTS) release under Oracle's new six month release strategy.

It's been just under one month since Oracle's long-awaited debut of Solaris 11.4 and now its first stable release update has been issued.

Two years after Solaris 11.3 and Oracle opting for a "continuous delivery" model of 11.next updates instead of a "Solaris 12", Solaris 11.4 is out the door today.

At the beginning of the year Oracle reaffirmed their commitment for DTrace on Linux. For those still interested in using this dynamic tracing framework on Linux, Oracle has been rolling out a number of feature updates.

In addition to sending down a new SRU for Solaris 11.3, the Oracle developers left maintaining Solaris have issued their second beta of the upcoming Solaris 11.4.

While Solaris 11.4 is still in the oven being baked at Oracle, the thirty-fourth stable release update of Solaris 11.3 is now available.

While Red Hat officially launched RHEL7 for ARM servers last November, on Friday Oracle finally announced the general availability of their RHEL7-derived Oracle Linux 7 for ARM.

Oracle has promoted its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 to general availability for x86_64 and ARM64 (AArch64) architectures.

Oracle Solaris 11.4 is still being prepared for release but in the meantime there is now the thirty-third stable release update for Solaris 11.3.

While waiting for Solaris 11.4 to be released, Oracle has today rolled out its thirty-second stable release update to Solaris 11.3.

The OpenSolaris-derived Illumos-based OpenIndiana operating system is out with their first Hipster update of the year.

Following Oracle offloading Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation and then renaming the project to Jakarta EE, we now know more about the future of this Java Enterprise Edition.

It's a busy day in the software and hardware space today as well as a busy week for Oracle with several big releases this week. The latest is the general availability of the long-awaited MySQL 8.0 update.

Tuesday was a very busy release day for Oracle folks as in addition to shipping an updated Solaris 11.4 beta and Oracle Linux 7 Update 5, their compiler folks also announced the GraalVM 1.0 virtual machine release.

While some at Oracle were busy releasing Oracle Linux 7 Update 5 as their RHEL7 downstream, the remaining Solaris developers were putting out a refreshed public beta spin of Solaris 11.4.

Just one week after launching Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, Oracle has released the latest version of their RHEL7-derived Oracle Linux 7. The Oracle Linux 7 Update 5 pulls in the latest *EL7 changes while also offering their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" option.

While the source to Oracle's "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" has been available via the company's own servers, now the organization is publishing their source kernel changes to GitHub in a bid to increase the popularity of their patched version of Linux.

JDK 10 has reached general availability as the first Java release under Oracle's new six-month release model.

Oracle has made available updated installation media for Oracle Linux 7 for ARM64.

Oracle published a SPARC and Solaris road-map updated for March 2018.

If for some reason you are still riding the Linux 4.1 kernel series, you really should think about upgrading to at least a newer LTS series in the near future. But if you still plan on riding it for a while longer, at least it's getting page table isolation support for Meltdown mitigation.

You may recall from last year that Oracle was looking to offload Java EE to someone else. They ended up putting the code on GitHub for Java Enterprise Edition and offering Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation, but that didn't include the name.

Oracle's current Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) release is making use of Linux 4.1 that is definitely showing its age... Fortunately, for those using this Oracle spin of the Linux kernel on their RHEL-clone Oracle Linux have UEK Release 5 in the pipe that is transitioning to Linux 4.14 LTS.

The OpenSolaris/Illumos-based OpenIndiana operating system has finally moved past GCC 4.9 as its base user-land compiler and is now using GCC 6.4.

A decade ago Linux users were clamoring for Sun Microsystems to bring Solaris' DTrace and ZFS to Linux. While there are still petitions for Oracle to more liberally license ZFS so it could see mainline Linux support, it's been years since hearing much interest in DTrace for Linux. Over time other dynamic tracing implementations have come about and improved in comparison to DTrace, but for those still wanting this dynamic tracing framework that originated at Sun Microsystems, Oracle remains working on the Linux port.

Oracle's Mark Reinhold spoke at last weekend's FOSDEM conference about the state of OpenJDK for open-source Java.