Oracle is pleased to announce the availability of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Release 7 Update 1(UEK R7U1) for Oracle Linux. UEK R7U1 introduces innovations in areas of container memory management, improvements to UEFI secure boot procedures, advancements in NFS, and new Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities with Intel® Advanced Matrix Extension (Intel®AMX). In addition, this release includes driver updates from key collaborators including Broadcom® Emulex®, Intel®, Marvell™, NVIDIA®, and Microsoft, and several important security improvements and bug fixes from the upstream community. Oracle Linux with UEK delivers reliability and performance for the most demanding workloads, including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle Database, and Oracle Exadata, bringing the same features used by Oracle to Oracle Linux customers. 

What’s New?

NFS courteous server

Data reliability and data loss prevention are critical to users and the new NFS courteous server feature helps deliver improvements to both. NFS session state tokens expire frequently, and if an NFS session state token expires while the network is interrupted there is a chance a transaction will be discontinued or lost – introducing the possibility of data inconsistency or corruption. With the courteous server, NFS can allow uncontested locks to persist even after the lease has expired, because the system will no longer immediately revoke the client’s session and instead will keep the previous state as valid until a conflict arises or the server restarts.

Machine Learning and AI

Intel Advanced Matrix Extension (Intel AMX), introduced with the 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor, is designed to boost AI matrix operation performance across data processing, training, and inference using an embedded AI acceleration engine. UEK R7U1 includes support for Intel AMX and requires no additional configuration changes. If a supported processor is detected, the kernel can be set up to automatically enable the features at runtime. In addition, the kernel’s virtualization userspace utility, QEMU, can perform the same autodetection and enablement with virtual guests running on a host with a supported processor.

Cgroup and memory optimizations

Memory optimizations for cgroups are included in this release, which virtually eliminates the 1:1 allocation of the memory between least-recently-used list (list_lru) tracking in the kernel and memcg. This can significantly reduce the amount of memory allocated for cgroups, and on systems hosting large quantities of containers, this can allow users to reclaim sizeable amounts of memory and help avoid performance bottlenecks.

PerfMon V2

The addition of the upstream changes to AMD PerfMon V2 in UEK R7U1 introduces the addition of global registers, which help simplify the ability to debug new generations of AMD processors by allowing users to enable and disable multiple performance counters at the same time.

Secure Boot improvements

Restrictions involving Certificate Authorities (CA) on machine keyrings have been removed with this release. This helps eliminate the issues users found with Machine Owned Keys (MOK) being rejected by the kernel unless the CA bit was previously loaded into the machine keyring. With these changes, all MOK certificates are loaded. For more information about secure boot, see Oracle Linux: Working With UEFI Secure Boot. 

UEK R7U1 for Oracle Linux is based on the mainline kernel version 5.15 and is identified by the release number ending in -100 (5.15.0-100). For additional details on these and other new features and changes, please review the Release Notes.

Security (CVE) Fixes

A full list of CVEs fixed in this release can be found in the Release Notes for the UEK R7U1.

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