Oracle: Availability of Ksplice extended, Unbreakable Kernel beta released

Oracle has now made Ksplice available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6. Red Hat customers who are interested in this solution for fixing kernel security holes during operation can download a 30-day trial version after completing a registration form; however, the announcement does not state whether Red Hat will still provide support for such a modified version.

In a blog post on the new additions, an Oracle employee said that the company will continue to offer the technology free of charge for Fedora and Ubuntu – Oracle acquired Ksplice last summer. The posting also said that the company's "Premier Support" subscription now includes Ksplice for the Oracle Linux kernels that are based on RHEL and compatible with it; the technology has been available for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) for some time.

Oracle has also released a new beta of the "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel release 2". According to the blog, this kernel is now approaching completion, and with it, Oracle plans to introduce official Btrfs filesystem support. The kernel is also designed to improve container virtualisation via LXC. Oracle has provided the kernel sources in a Git repository. While its version number contains 2.6.39, the kernel appears to be based on the long-term kernels in the Linux 3.0 series.

(djwm)