Hello and welcome to this introductory video on Oracle Linux.
This video discusses the many advantages of using
Oracle Linux.
After watching this video, you will learn about:
Some advantages to using Oracle Linux
Oracle's commitment and technical contributions to Linux
the relationship between Oracle Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Oracle Linux release/update targets relative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and finally Oracle Linux innovations including the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel
(UEK) for Oracle Linux, Ksplice Zero Downtime Updates, and DTrace dynamic tracking.
Let's now discuss Oracle Linux's Open and leading performance ad
Oracle Linux is an open and complete operating environment that helps accelerate
digital transformation.
Oracle Linux delivers leading performance and security for hybrid and multi-cloud
deployments.
Other advantages include:
Free to use, free to distribute, and free to update
Zero-downtime kernel for applying patches with Premier support
Optimized for highly demanding workloads
Lower total cost of ownership
These are just a few of the many advantages of Oracle Linux that exist.
Oracle’s long-term vision is focused on continuing to enhance and extend the
enterprise-class capabilities of Linux, and this vision is manifested through the
many projects and code contributions that Oracle shares with the Linux community.
Oracle continues to strengthen its involvement in the Linux community by providing
enhancements that facilitate the development and deployment of enterprise Linux
solutions.
With Oracle Linux, regarding the code developed, 100% of that code
becomes available to the open source community for Linux.
The following are just some of Oracle’s many technical contributions to the Linux
community that benefit anyone using Linux:
Asynchronous IO (AIO) Kernel Subsystem is used to make system calls asynchronous in
a generic fashion to ensure that Oracle databases run properly on Linux.
Btrfs or better fs is designed to address the expanding scalability requirements
of large storage subsystems.
Ext3 file system data-guarded mode, proposed by the Oracle’s Linux Engineering Team,
maintains all the security protections of data-ordered mode without
requiring all the dirty data on the file system to be written during a single fsync.
Mainline Linux kernel development is an ongoing endeavor due to newly developed hardware
which creates new requirements, and new and different challenges.
There are massive scalability differences in the way the new hardware works, particularly
regarding high-speed networking and storage.
New devices are dramatically faster than the original kernel stack was developed
for. A huge number of changes have been put into new kernels to deal with these
devices efficiently. However, older enterprise kernels are not able to take advantage
of that.
Another hardware advancement of concern for the Linux kernel is the CPU.
CPUs rely on power management to perform well.
Each individual CPU socket has several cores and threads, and they all have to work
in tandem with awareness from the operating system to maintain power and thermal
management.
The newer kernels have had a lot of work done to them to address these things, but
kernel development will continue due to advances in computer hardware.
Oracle Linux is fully compatible—both source and binary—with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Applications that run on RHEL run on Oracle Linux.
Tremendous effort has gone into assuring that there is no divergence from the original
Red Hat source code, given that the main goal of Oracle Linux and the Oracle Linux
Support program is to not fragment the Linux code base, but to improve Linux quality
and support.
Oracle Linux is built from the very same source code as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Oracle Linux uses identical source to RHEL to maintain binary compatibility, but
may make changes for trademarks and copyright reasons.
The Oracle Linux source code is recompiled into binaries and made available for
download and produced into CD images.
Oracle also applies several bug fixes on top of the original code.
These fixes are critical for customers to have as soon as possible in their production
deployment.
To ensure that the Oracle Linux distribution remains binary compatible with Red
Hat, Oracle has developed business processes to ensure that as new releases/updates
are made available by Red Hat, the binary compatible releases/updates for Oracle
Linux will shortly follow.
In September 2010, Oracle announced the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle
Linux as a recommended kernel to deploy with Oracle Linux or Red Hat Enterprise
Linux.
The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is heavily tested with Oracle workloads and therefore
recommended for Oracle deployments and all other enterprise deployments.
Using the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel instead of the Red Hat compatible kernel
changes only the kernel, user applications do not change in the user space.
Existing applications run unchanged regardless of which kernel is used.
Another benefit for using Oracle Linux is DTrace.
DTrace allows static and dynamic tracing of your applications and your kernel.
It does static tracing by allowing instrumentation compiled into the kernel and
the applications.
Oracle Linux is the only Linux distribution to support DTrace.
DTrace is fully integrated with Oracle Linux and UEK.
At specific points of execution in your code, you can activate the probes and designate
actions, such as collecting and displaying information.
DTrace also allows you to dynamically define probe points “on the fly.”
That means they are not precompiled into the kernel or into your application.
Oracle's Ksplice allows you to apply kernel and select user space library updates
without having to reboot the system.
Ksplice patches come only from Oracle.
These go into Oracle Linux releases, are tested by Oracle, and then are turned
into Ksplice binary updates from Oracle Linux packages.
You apply updates using Ksplice tools and then the patches are up and running.
Ksplice allows you to maintain highly available systems that are also very
secure.
To demonstrate ksplice, list the available kernel updates type
sudo ksplice kernel show --available.
Apply the ksplice patches by typing sudo ksplice -y kernel upgrade.
Next, display the effective version of the kernel type sudo ksplice kernel uname -r.
And as you will see the ksplice uname option takes the same flags as the Linux
uname command.
Notice that the effective kernel version is now newer than the on-disk version.
Oracle provides an extensive number of resources which you can use to learn more
about this subject and others.
Look for additional videos on Oracle Linux and other topics using the link shown.
This concludes the video.
Thank you for watching.