The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.2 (UEK 8.2) is now available for Oracle Linux, introducing enhancements for confidential computing, file system reliability, and memory management, along with critical security improvements and bug fixes from the upstream community. Oracle Linux featuring UEK delivers mission-critical performance and security optimizations tailored to run customers’ most data- and compute-intensive workloads across distributed environments, including Oracle Database, Oracle Exadata, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

UEK 8.2 is developed, built, tested, and supported on the 64-bit Intel and AMD (x86-64) and 64-bit Arm (aarch64) architectures. It is based on the mainline long-term stable Linux kernel 6.12 and is identified by the release number ending in -200 (6.12.0-200).

What’s new in UEK 8.2

Select features, enhancements, and changes introduced in this release are highlighted below. For more detailed information, refer to the UEK 8.2 Release Notes.

Confidential computing enhancements

Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) is Intel’s confidential computing technology used to provide trusted execution environments. TDX enables virtual workloads to run within isolated trust domains, where hardware-based protections encrypt and manage memory to help maintain the integrity and confidentiality of CPU state. UEK 8.2 provides guest and hypervisor support for TDX on Oracle Linux 9 and Oracle Linux 10.

Note: Intel TDX confidential computing capability is a technology preview feature when used outside of OCI.

Higher file system reliability with XFS online repair

UEK 8.2 delivers support for XFS online file system repair, a major enhancement that allows administrators to check and repair XFS file systems while they remain mounted and operational. This capability helps reduce downtime and improve maintainability for mission-critical and large-scale deployments where taking file systems offline can disrupt active workloads.

XFS online repair is enabled through the xfs_scrub utility, which verifies file system metadata and can detect and correct corruption without requiring the file system to be unmounted. When inconsistencies are identified, targeted repairs can be performed while the system continues serving active workloads.

Strengthened memory protection and diagnostics

UEK 8.2 introduces lightweight guard pages, which provide a mechanism for marking regions of virtual memory so that they trigger segmentation faults (SIGSEGV) when accessed. This capability is particularly useful for thread stacks and user-space memory allocators. Before lightweight guard pages, similar functionality was achieved using memory mappings with restricted permissions. As processes and threads scale, this approach can introduce additional memory overhead. Lightweight guard pages instead use guard markers that avoid creating or splitting virtual memory areas, helping eliminate that overhead and improving efficiency for systems running large numbers of processes and threads.

Memory allocation profiling is also available in UEK 8.2, providing insight into how memory is allocated and freed within the system. By tracking allocation activity—including where memory is allocated, when memory is freed, the number of allocations, and how much memory remains in use—this capability can help developers better understand memory usage patterns and identify potential memory leaks.

Updated Drivers

In close cooperation with leading hardware vendors, Oracle has updated several device drivers and worked with the vendors to align these drivers with the code available in upstream kernel versions.

Resources

For more information, see the following Oracle Linux resources:

Software downloads

Documentation and training

GitHub

Keep in touch!