The Oracle Linux team is pleased to announce the general availability of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Release 4 for Oracle Linux 6 and Oracle Linux 7.  This release, based on the 4.1 mainline kernel, delivers many important new features and enhancements engineered for modern cloud infrastructure.  

• Significant performance improvements through enhancements to features like automatic NUMA balancing and CPU schedulers, and the introduction of new features like zswap, zram, the LZ4 compression algorithm, network batch transmissions and low-latency network polling.
• More options for boosting the security of systems and the applications they host. UEK Release 4 now includes kernel address space randomization, a new random number system call and updates in key areas like SELinux, nftables, SHA256 and SHA512.
• Real-time kernel and userspace patching with Ksplice for Oracle Linux to simplify managing cloud infrastructure and improve security.
• Support for key cloud technologies. Xen host and guest domain feature and performance enhancements, Open vSwitch and VXLAN improvements for networking, cgroups and namespace enhancements for linux containers and Docker.
• Enhancements to Oracle Linux DTrace for dynamic, real-time system tracing on production systems
• The production release and support of Ceph Storage for Oracle Linux Release 1.0, based on the upstream Firefly release
• New real-time kernel features including timerless (tickless) multitasking and the addition of the deadline scheduling class
• Enhanced infiniband features including improved protocols, drivers and firmware.
• A number of updates to key areas such as XFS, Btrfs, Ext4, NFS, FUSE and the Overlay file systems.
• A number of driver updates supporting the latest hardware.

This has been a major engineering effort that can benefit every Oracle Linux customer. For more information on this release, please review the release notes here.

Oracle Linux is available to download from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud and the Oracle Yum repos.