Oracle Debuts Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel
The relationship between Oracle and Red Hat becomes even more strained.
At Oracle OpenWorld Oracle announced the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. Oracle touts the kernel as being more than 75 percent faster than Red Hat according to OLTP benchmarking.
The kernel itself is based on the 2.6.32 mainline kernel. It allows for existing Oracle Linux 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 customers to upgrade without reinstalling the entire operating system. Oracle says that third party applications for both RHEL 5 and Oracle Linux will run unabated. At the same time, however, the announcement slips in a mention that from this point forward the Unbreakable Kernel is the only kernel Oracle recommends using.
Between this announcement at Red Hat's decision to stop support Xen in favor of the KVM virtualization technologies that came with the acquisition of Qumranet, it looks like the future of Red Hat and Oracle compatibility is a shaky one.
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