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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!
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.
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