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Oracle Q&A: A Refresher on Unbreakable Linux Kernel (Linux.com)

[Posted January 6, 2011 by jake]

Over at Linux.com, Jennifer Cloer talks with Oracle's Monica Kumar about its "Unbreakable Linux Kernel". Oracle provides the 2.6.32-based kernel as an alternative to run atop its RHEL 5 clone. "Kumar: Over the years, a number of Oracle developers have made significant contributions to Linux in the areas of clustering, data integrity, file systems, virtualization, asynchronous I/O, testing and more. Oracle's Linux development team is an integral part of the Linux community. Our team, working with the Linux community, understands how to make Linux even better in performance, scalability and reliability. Even the "optimized for Oracle" contributions can benefit all Linux distributions and any application that wants to take advantage of them."

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Jan 6, 2011 17:07 UTC (Thu) by prometheanfire (subscriber, #65683) [Link]

The question that I would have liked to see answered is how this kernel is different then a normal 2.6.32 kernel.

Oracle Q&A: A Refresher on Unbreakable Linux Kernel (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 6, 2011 17:18 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link]

According to the interview,

"* Source code is available, including a public git repository with full changelog and individual patches and checkins for convenience."

That would presumably be this one:

http://oss.oracle.com/git/linux-2.6-unbreakable.git/?p=li...

Or maybe not; the last commit there was four months ago.

Oracle Q&A: A Refresher on Unbreakable Linux Kernel (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 6, 2011 20:50 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

I believe that there was an article pointed to many months ago by LWN, where Chris Mason (I think) described the real differences. It was worth the read.

Oracle Q&A: A Refresher on Unbreakable Linux Kernel (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 7, 2011 11:29 UTC (Fri) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]

The link : http://lwn.net/Articles/406242/

Oracle Q&A: A Refresher on Unbreakable Linux Kernel (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 6, 2011 17:22 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

The summary mentions the 2.6.32-based kernel as an "alternative" to the RHEL 5 clone. Just curious, what kernel version does RHEL 5 ship with?

Oracle Q&A: A Refresher on Unbreakable Linux Kernel (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 6, 2011 17:26 UTC (Thu) by nteon (subscriber, #53899) [Link]

2.6.18, heavily modified

Oracle Q&A: A Refresher on Unbreakable Linux Kernel (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 6, 2011 19:51 UTC (Thu) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]

Oracle paid for a lot of the BtrFS work, but they totally suck as a steward of Java and OpenOffice. On the whole FOSS would be better off if Oracle would just vanish IMO.

Oracle Q&A: A Refresher on Unbreakable Linux Kernel (Linux.com)

Posted Jan 9, 2011 7:48 UTC (Sun) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Large corporations don't think with a single unified brain. Many of them are a hodgepodge of internal business units that compete internally for resources and have different philosophies. It certainly appears that Oracle is this way, and the result is that you'll see both FLOSS-friendly and FLOSS-hostile actions coming from the same company. Once in a while, top management will intervene and slap down one of the competing parties, but until that happens, different groups may well go their own way.

So, for example, you'll see Intel becoming increasingly FLOSS-friendly and then do a Poulsbo, because the group making that decision was just doing a local optimization and wasn't thinking about Linux, even though other groups consider Linux quite important.

Corporate coherence

Posted Jan 18, 2011 22:04 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Large corporations don't think with a single unified brain.

Stupid corporations don't; intelligent corporations maintain coherence throughout its business units. Even when it means adapting to different markets using a variety of tactics. I have learned to appreciate it when working for a large group (100k+ employees) which works hard at maintaining coherence through its (often disparate) units.

In your example, Intel was trying to look free-software friendly and then did a Poulsbo, so it lost many of the points it had earned through hard work and probably burnt even a lot of employee goodwill. Think about a company trying to look eco-friendly and then dumping its waste in a backyard. It makes you think that the company was evil all along and was just washing its face, or at best that it is careless and messy; not that it is "a hodgepodge of internal business units". So it happens with Oracle.