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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."
This Barbie has a new hat!
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.
If the idea was to cause panic or start a conspiracy theory, it failed miserably. Nothing to see. Oracle is simply making a new kernel available which is newer and has more enhancements. Instead of waiting for RH, they are taking control of that piece of the distribution (if customers want it). Oracle should do the same with the rest of the OS and try to innovate there, instead of simply distributing pristine RHEL with their logos. But then, they already have Solaris which is much more suited for the markets they are aiming at (high-end enterprise servers), so why waste the time ?
none
What did you expect, that Oracle will have coded their own kernel from scratch? Every distro uses a version of the same Linux kernel. TFA is a troll.
Caveat Utilitor
They made direct comparisons to RedHat kernels claiming performance, security and stability enhancements? If it is the same, then those claims cannot possibly be true. This is confusing... and troubling.
3. ???
3. Support.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Just one example of why this is good - iotop.
I've been watching the RHEL bug for adding iotop since at least RHEL 5.3. It keeps getting bumped, now RHEL 5.7 IIRC.
It would require a bunch of backporting work from the kernel beyond 2.6.18. But once sysadmins get used to knowing which disks are busy they really get used to that. And doubly so for optimizing database servers.
Redhat's strategy gains them certainty and loses them opportunity. That's certainly a niche that's done well for them, but there are also users with other needs. Oracle's strategy will be very popular with some of them. When Redhat brings RHEL6 to market there will be lots of required subsystem changes to get the new kernel. Some people will just want the new kernel and not want to change all their underlying dependencies, and Oracle is meeting that need. Eventually Fedora will adopt a rolling-release model and RHEL will track that (probably with more QA) but it's a hard problem and not well-solved yet.
It's great that we have such a vibrant market that there's room for so many approaches.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yeah, imagine that. Nintendo didn't want to give Sony complete control over something that Nintendo had essentially created. Those bastards.
-- Linux user #369862
To innovate means to make something new happen. It doesn't have to be radically new, just something that wasn't available before. In the real world, most innovations are pretty humble, but humble doesn't imply not useful.
Do you ever look at Crapware 7.0 and think they just added some 3D arrows for absolutely no reason? Now look at TFA and the reactions here, this is *precisely* why the marketers demand idiotic features.
If you've actually set up Oracle on a system, you quickly realize that a. it's hugely complicated but b. it's a solved problem so c. why am I going through all this pain when Oracle has done this already? Of course, they have, calling it OEL just makes it easy to explain to the boss.
And for anyone trying to maintain an Oracle system, this is a big deal. It is not an understatement that for the typical business, their Oracle database more or less *is* the business. You want something that's going to work, with no nonsense, and you want to keep it up to date.
Oracle Linux is Unbreakable and better than Linux.
BUT Linux is bad mojo.... if you want a real OS and not a toy, use Oracle's Solaris.
Somehow they failed to add that last bit. Mixed messages from a VERY mixed up company.
People may want to check the LWN discussion on the topic, which includes comments from Chris Mason and others concerning their improvements over vanilla 2.6.32:
http://lwn.net/Articles/406242/
Not their flagship database offering. But, you're right, since they acquired Sun, we now have Oracle OpenOffice.org, Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle MySQL, etc., much like before when they acquired SleepyCat so we have Oracle Berkeley DB.
Maybe Oracle should acquire Embarcadero, so we could have Oracle Delphi! *drum fill*
Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week!
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Whenever a company starts calling their product unbreakable or indestructible or unhackable or whatever, I start thinking Titanic.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Funny since Borland named came up with the name Delphi as a reference to its ability to connect to the Oracle database.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
this kernel is not the same as RedHat's, there are improvements geared toward Oracle's DBMS
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.
So, let me get this straight. Oracle is "bad" because they announced that their distribution had a "modern" kernel, but it's "only" 2.6.32 with custom patches, not 2.6.35 which is totally almost 2 months old now so there's no excuse for it not to be in there!!!! And, Oracle is a jerk who just takes and takes without contributing back, because they are "only barely" in the top 20 contributors to the kernel (and the kernel is only one small part of Linux so basically they don't contribute at all). What a troll! At least the article is up-front about being written by a Novell employee. (Wait no it's not, it sort of slips that into the middle).
And Mr. Sour Grapes Novell employee is just pleased as punch over pointing out the "dirty secret" Oracle tried to hide, by publicly announcing that Oracle Linux would be running the 2.6.32 kernel, with custom patches to improve performance on certain hardware, and for Oracle software. How sneaky of them, you could never tell by reading that, that it's actually the 2.6.32 kernel (WHICH IS SO OLD HOW DARE THEY CALL IT MODERN).
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
We bought the support from them. No penguin.
I see why you had to post that anonymously.
This could be glossing over quite a bit of useful work for Oracles customers.
You are glossing over the point of the article.
1. Redhat writes lots of great Linux stuff that make the kernel better (11.6% of the kernel).
2. Oracle passes it off as their own. (They only contribute 1.3%, less that 1/10 that of Red Hat).
Anecdotal evidence, but where I work there were some people using pro*fortran to access Oracle databases from Fortran. pro*fortran was dropped between Oracle 8 and 8.1
It took six months of digging for the Oracle support people to finally tell us they had dropped pro*fortran from their product. Everyone kept saying "sure, we support Fortran, but that's not my specialty, let me get an expert for you"
When the technical support people don't know their own product, what worth is it paying for that it?
>>>Nintendo didn't want to give Sony complete control over something that Nintendo had essentially created.
False. Sony and Nintendo had created a partnership for the CD addon and of course would share both expenses and profits. The arrangement was similar to the Sony/Phillips arrangement (they both bore the cost of developing the Audio CD). Then Nintendo decided they didn't want a CD addon after all because it would be too easy to pirate the games, so they jumped ship, leaving Sony with all the incurred debt.
So YES Nintendo screwed Sony, just the same as if we agreed to buy a car together but then I suddenly backed-out, leaving you with the $20,000 bill.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
There are things Oracle could use if they really wanted "unbreakable". There are some very tough microkernels available. LynxOS is certified to DO-178B leval A for safety-critical software, yet it can run Linux ABI binaries.
LynxOS drives quite a number of systems with serious firepower. The Navy Shipboard Self-Defense System, the "Multiple Missile Kill Vehicle", stuff like that. On the civilian side, LinxOS powers the Airbus navigation system.
There's a performance penalty over Linux, and LynxOS is not free. But if it really has to work, there are options.
So YES Nintendo screwed Sony, just the same as if we agreed to buy a car together but then I suddenly backed-out, leaving you with the $20,000 bill.
Nintendo didn't just screw Sony. They made the Philips announcement without telling Sony that the deal was off first. According to interviews Sony was demonstrating the SNES-CD when this happened and were utterly humiliated. Up to then the company at large was reluctant to enter the gaming marked, they only entered because but some engineers at Sony had managed to get some contracts with Nintendo (for instance they designed the SNES sound chip), but when Nintendo made a fool out of them the big boss took it personally.
Sony wasn't the first big-corp that tried to take a chunk of the gaming marked. NEC, for instance, was bigger and went in sooner. But Sony didn't just release great hardware, they went the extra mile by getting the needed games and marketing campaign to make it all matter. It's possible that Sony's rage is the reason for that.
False. Sony had a deal that in essence gave them control and Nintendo naturally didn't want that and canceled the deal. They also made a deal with Phillips. It's not like it's poor old Sony here, they're bastards and the way you're trying to portray it is Nintendo just did it for shits and giggles. They didn't-
-- Linux user #369862
OTOH, it is moist and delicious.
I postulate that, in spite of the published corporate history, Aperture Science must have started life as Oracle.
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