Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel based on Linux 6.12 LTS

Oracle's UEK R8 kernel, based on Linux 6.12 LTS, was released on April 15, 2025. The new solution is launched for Oracle Linux as an alternative to the kernel package from RHEL. This kernel is only available for x86_64 and ARM64 architectures. The kernel code consists of several patches that are public in the Git repository.

As for new characteristics in UEK R8, there is compatibility with most applications running on RHEL, and it also functions with Oracle hardware and industrial software. Installation packages with the UEK R8 kernel are focused on Oracle Linux 9.5, but they can be used seamlessly on similar versions of Rocky Linux, RHEL, Alma, and others.

Highlights of Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8

The main changes in UEK R8 are support for Intel SGX features, changes to Btrfs, some memory management optimizations, ASMLib, and DTrace 2.0. In addition, the EEVDF scheduler is now available, and the default base page size is 64 KB.