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Oracle Linux 6 Release Notes

A few days ago, Oracle followed suit by Red Hat and released OEL6. Here are the Oracle Linux 6 Release Notes.

At first glance, most notable changes are default ext4 file system. Better performance monitoring and tracking using perf and new user space "top" tools, and it no longer uses up2date but instead relies totally on yum. Yummie! Last but not least: the Unbreakable Kernel kernel-uek-2.6.32-100.28.5.el6 is installed and activated by default! This shouldn't matter much, unless you run the latest state-of-the-art hardware and use SSDs a lot. But 3rd party software vendors may like you stepping away from the Red Hat default kernel-2.6.32-71.el6 kernel. So check first!

OL6 is the first Linux distribution from Oracle where they no longer patch the Red Hat kernel. Instead, they provide the Red Hat kernel as-is as an option to be configured for use in /etc/grub/menu.lst. The default kernel in OL6 is the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel that Oracle maintains itself. As far as I know, this kernel is an OEL5u5 kernel plus fixes and patches.

Update: DVDs now online too
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