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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 ?
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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)
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.
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.
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.