Oracle Linux (abbreviated OL, formerly known as Oracle Enterprise Linux or OEL) is a

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

packaged and freely distributed by

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word ...

, available partially under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

since late 2006. It is compiled from

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop ...

(RHEL)

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...

, replacing Red Hat branding with Oracle's. It is also used by

Oracle Cloud Oracle Cloud is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation providing servers, storage, network, applications and services through a global network of Oracle Corporation managed data centers. The company allows ...

and Oracle Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata and others. Potential users can freely download Oracle Linux through Oracle's E-delivery service (Oracle Software Delivery Cloud) or from a variety of mirror sites, and can deploy and distribute it without cost. The company's ''Oracle Linux Support program'' aims to provide commercial technical support, covering Oracle Linux and existing RHEL or

CentOS CentOS (, from Community Enterprise Operating System; also known as CentOS Linux) is a Linux distribution that provides a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat En ...

installations but without any certification from the former (i.e. without re-installation or re-boot). Oracle Linux had over 15,000 customers subscribed to the support program.

RHEL compatibility

Oracle Corporation distributes Oracle Linux with two alternative

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...

s: * ''Red Hat Compatible Kernel'' (RHCK) identical to the kernel shipped in RHEL * ''Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel'' (UEK) based on newer mainline Linux kernel versions, with Oracle's own enhancements for OLTP,

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also use ...

SSD A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is a ...

disk access,

NUMA Nuclear mitotic apparatus protein 1 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the ''NUMA1'' gene. Interactions Nuclear mitotic apparatus protein 1 has been shown to interact with PIM1, Band 4.1, GPSM2 G-protein-signaling modulator 2, also ca ...

-optimizations,

Reliable Datagram Sockets Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) is a high-performance, low-latency, reliable, connectionless protocol for delivering datagrams. It is developed by Oracle Corporation. It was included in the Linux kernel 2.6.30 which was released on 9th of June ...

(RDS), async I/O, OCFS2, and networking. Oracle promotes Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel as having 100% compatibility with RHEL, even though this is essentially impossible to guarantee due to the kernel's ABI changing due to various factors, including the kernel being based on a newer version which has many thousands of differences from Red Hat's kernel. While the Linux kernel developers, upstream, try never to break userspace, it has happened before. Oracle's compatibility claims lead the user to conclude that third-party RHEL-certified applications will behave properly on the Oracle kernel, which may or may not always be true.

Hardware compatibility

Oracle Linux is certified on servers including from IBM,

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

Lenovo Lenovo Group Limited, often shortened to Lenovo ( , ), is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, business solutions, and related se ...

, and

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

. In 2010, Force10 announced support for

Oracle VM Server for x86 An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word ''o ...

and Oracle Linux. Oracle Linux is also available on

Amazon EC2 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of ...

as an

Amazon Machine Image An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a special type of virtual appliance that is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ("EC2"). It serves as the basic unit of deployment for services delivered using EC2. Contents ...

, and on Microsoft

Windows Azure Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure ( , ), is a cloud computing platform operated by Microsoft for application management via around the world-distributed data centers. Microsoft Azure has multiple capabilities such as software as ...

as a VM Image. Oracle/Sun servers with

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging ...

processors can be configured to ship with Oracle Linux. In November 2017, Oracle announced Oracle Linux on the ARM platform with support for the Raspberry Pi 3, Cavium ThunderX and X-Gene 3.

Virtualization support

Under the Oracle Linux Support program, Oracle Linux supports KVM, Xen and

Openstack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software pl ...

. Other Oracle products are only supported under the Xen-based Oracle VM Server for x86.

Deployment inside Oracle Corporation

Oracle Corporation uses Oracle Linux extensively within Oracle Public Cloud, internally to lower IT costs. Oracle Linux is deployed on more than 42,000 servers by Oracle Global IT; the SaaS ''Oracle On Demand'' service, Oracle University, and Oracle's technology demo systems also run Oracle Linux. Software developers at Oracle develop

Oracle Database Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. It is a database commonly used for running online ...

, Fusion Middleware, E-Business Suite and other components of

Oracle Applications Oracle Applications comprise the applications software or business software of the Oracle Corporation both in the cloud and on-premises. The term refers to the non-database and non-middleware parts. The suite of applications includes enterprise res ...

on Oracle Linux.

Related products

Oracle Linux is used as the underlying operating system for the following appliances. * Oracle Exadata * Oracle Private Cloud Appliance * Oracle Big Data Appliance * Oracle Exalytics *

Oracle Database Appliance The Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is a database server appliance made by Oracle Corporation. It was introduced in September 2011 as the mid-market offering in Oracle's family of full-stack, integrated systems the company calls engineered sy ...

Specific additions

Ksplice Ksplice is an open-source extension of the Linux kernel that allows security patches to be applied to a running kernel without the need for reboots, avoiding downtimes and improving availability (a technique broadly referred to as dynamic sof ...

– Oracle acquired ''Ksplice Inc'' in 2011, and offers Oracle Linux users Ksplice to enable hot kernel patching *

DTrace DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released und ...

– , Oracle has begun porting DTrace from Solaris as a Linux kernel module *

Oracle Clusterware Oracle Clusterware is the cross-platform cluster software required to run the Real Application Clusters (RAC) option for Oracle Database. It provides the basic clustering services at the operating-system level that enable Oracle Database soft ...

– OS-level

high availability High availability (HA) is a characteristic of a system which aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime, for a higher than normal period. Modernization has resulted in an increased reliance on these systems. F ...

technology used by Oracle RAC * Oracle Enterprise Manager – freely available to users with Oracle Linux support subscriptions to manage, monitor, and provision Oracle Linux. *

BTRFS Btrfs (pronounced as "better F S", "butter F S", "b-tree F S", or simply by spelling it out) is a computer storage format that combines a file system based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle with a logical volume manager (not to be confused ...

Benchmark submissions

Sun Fire systems

In March 2012, Oracle submitted a TPC-C benchmark result using an x86 Sun Fire server running Oracle Linux and Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. With 8

Intel Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same arc ...

processors running Oracle DB 11 R2, the system was benchmarkeded at handling over 5.06 million tpmC (New-Order transactions per minute while fulfilling TPC-C). The server was rated at the time as the third-fastest TPC-C non-clustered system and the fastest x86-64 non-clustered system. Oracle also submitted a SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark record using Oracle Linux and

Oracle WebLogic Server Oracle WebLogic Server is a Java EE application server currently developed by Oracle Corporation. Oracle acquired WebLogic Server when it purchased BEA Systems in 2008. Application Server versions * WebLogic Server 14c (14.1.1) - March 30, 2020 ...

, and achieved both a single node and an x86 world record result of 27,150 EjOPS (SPECjEnterprise Operation/second).

Cisco UCS systems

Cisco submitted 2 TPC-C benchmark results that run Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R2 on UCS systems. The UCS systems rank fourth and eighth on the top TPC-C non-clustered list.

SPARC version

In December 2010, Oracle CEO

Larry Ellison Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American business magnate and investor who is the co-founder, executive chairman, chief technology officer (CTO) and former chief executive officer (CEO) of the American computer technology ...

, in response to a question on Oracle's Linux strategy, said that at some point in the future Oracle Linux would run on Oracle's

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...

platforms. At Oracle OpenWorld 2014 John Fowler, Oracle's Executive Vice President for Systems, also said that Linux will be able to run on SPARC at some point. In October 2015, Oracle released a Linux reference platform for SPARC systems based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. In September 2016, Oracle released information about an upcoming product, Oracle Exadata SL6-2, a database server using SPARC processors running Linux. On 31 March 2017, Oracle posted the first public release of Oracle Linux for SPARC, installable on SPARC T4, T5, M5, and M7 processors. The release notes state that the release is being made available "for the benefit of developers and partners", but is only supported on Exadata SL6 hardware.

Software updates and version history

In March 2012, Oracle announced free software updates and errata for Oracle Linux on Oracle's public yum repositories. In September 2013, Oracle announced that each month its free public yum servers handle 80 TB of data, and the switch to the Akamai

content delivery network A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially rel ...

to handle the traffic growth.

Release history

* Oracle Linux 9, 9.1 * Oracle Linux 8, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7 * Oracle Linux 7, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9 * Oracle Linux 6, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 6.10 * Oracle Linux 5, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 5.8, 5.9, 5.10, 5.11 * Oracle Enterprise Linux 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 4.9 Oracle Linux uses a version-naming convention identical to that of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (e.g. the first version, Oracle Linux 4.5, is based on RHEL 4.5).

Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux

Oracle announced on 24 September 2014 Oracle

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software pl ...

for Oracle Linux distribution which allows users to control Oracle Linux and Oracle VM through OpenStack in production environments. Based on the OpenStack Icehouse release, Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux distribution is a cloud management software product that provides an enterprise type solution to deploy and manage the IT environment. The product maintains the flexibility of OpenStack, allowing users to deploy different configurations, and to integrate with different software and hardware vendors. Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux is available for free download. There is no licensing cost. It can be downloaded for free from the Oracle web page. Supported OpenStack Services in Version 1 includes Nova, Keystone, Cinder, Glance, Neutron, Horizon and Swift. According to Oracle the support for Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux is included as part of Oracle Premier Support for Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, and Systems.

References

External links

* * {{Use dmy dates, date=February 2020 Enterprise Linux distributions Oracle software RPM-based Linux distributions X86-64 Linux distributions Linux distributions