After last week’s release of Red Hat’s RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 7.3 operating system, now Oracle is proud to announce the general availability of its Oracle Linux 7.3 distribution for 64-bit (x86_64) servers.
Based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 and powered by its kernel-3.10.0-514.el7 Linux kernel package, Oracle Linux 7 Update 3 appears to be the first release of the server-oriented Linux-based operating system to use Oracle’s new Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 4 (UEK R4), versioned kernel-uek-4.1.12-61.1.18.el7uek. Oracle Linux 7.3 also introduces UEFI and Secure Boot support.
“This is the first Oracle Linux 7 ISO to include UEK Release 4 (UEK R4). Please note that new installations of Oracle Linux 7 Update 3 will install and boot the UEK R4 kernel by default. However, updates to existing Oracle Linux 7 environments require the user to explicitly install UEK R4 and will not automatically replace existing UEK R3 kernels,” wrote Teri Whitaker, Program Manager at Oracle, in the release announcement.
Oracle Linux 7.3 supports the latest UEK R3u7 and later
In the good tradition of the operating system, Oracle Linux 7.3 supports both the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) and Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK) kernels, but it boots the former by default, while the latter can be manually enabled by administrators. However, Oracle Linux 7 Update 3 continues to support the latest Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 Update 7 and later.
As expected, those who have an active support subscription for Oracle Linux can now download the ISO installation images of Oracle Linux 7.3 from My Oracle Support, as well as from Oracle Software Delivery Cloud. Oracle also provides individual RPM packages for Oracle Linux 7.3 on the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) and a public YUM server. Users are encouraged to update their installations as soon as possible.
