The Real Truth About Oracle's 'New' Kernel

An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday at OpenWorld, Oracle announced a 'new' Enterprise kernel for its so-called Unbreakable Linux. What's the real truth? The company is simply sticking a 2.6.32-based kernel on top of its re-branded Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone and trying to spin it as a new and innovative development."

Comments

Uhh, isn't this what Oracle customers pay for?

[NevarMore]

Oracle is simply offering a newer kernel than Red Hat and fine-tuning it for Oracle's own software.

This could be glossing over quite a bit of useful work for Oracles customers. "Fine tuning" could be anything from tweaking some compiler settings to actually patching things in the kernel. Its hardly a trivial task given the size and complexity that most Oracle customers bring.

Re:Uhh, isn't this what Oracle customers pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh please, oracle customer complexities are a result from the oracle usage and not the motivation for it.

oracle is one of those business providing useless solution so they can charge you twice for the consultancy.

Re:Uhh, isn't this what Oracle customers pay for?

[AnonymousClown]

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Re:1, 2, 3, Profit!

[bill_mcgonigle]

3. ???

3. Support.

Unbreakable Linux?

[Sonny Yatsen]

Whenever a company starts calling their product unbreakable or indestructible or unhackable or whatever, I start thinking Titanic.

engineering != rhetorical bile

[luis_a_espinal]

oh please, oracle customer complexities are a result from the oracle usage and not the motivation for it.

Oh wow, what a revelation. Using a complex software causes usage complexity. Here, have a banana as a price.

Yeah, usage of Oracle causes usage complexity. Does that mean that fine tuning a Linux distro to ease the pain of configuring a box suitable for Oracle products is something trivial, or non important, or what? What was exactly the point?

It doesn't even have to be for running Oracle database-related problems. When you run a EE container, be it JBoss or WebLogic (now a Oracle product) on a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris box that sits between a HTTP server and a database server, you are still bound to tune it for efficient performance according to the specifics of the system. I cannot think of anyone simply dropping a box with software on it on production without the necessary configuration.

That configuration is repetitive, tedious and specific for any non-trivial product for non-trivial usage. It is hardly an Oracle side effect. Typically sysadmins have to automate those configuration changes (or keep a golden ghost pre-configured image.) No matter what, that is still a burden. Better yet to have a vendor backing a set of configuration items already packaged into a turnkey solution.

oracle is one of those business providing useless solution so they can charge you twice for the consultancy.

Just because you don't like it and like to apply partisan ideologies to engineering, that does not mean that what they do is useless. It might be useless to you, might be useless in some (actually many) business contexts. But that does not mean anything on the general case where having an Oracle solution (not just an oracle database) is a useless solution.

Engineering != rhetorical bile.