The Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise KernelUnbreakable Enterprise Kernel is claimed by the company to represent a 75 percent performance gain in OLTP performance tests over a Red Hat Compatible Kernel. Announced as part of the company's Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne conference, this new Linux kernel is optimized for Oracle software and hardware and is part of Oracle Linux, which was previously named "Oracle Enterprise Linux".

Now the only Linux kernel Oracle recommends for use with Oracle software, the latest edition of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and the new Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud rely on the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for their performance. The company notes that its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is optimized for large NUMA servers with improved power management and energy efficiency; fine grained CPU and memory resource control.

"This new offering is a result of Oracle Linux kernel development efforts, on top of the current mainline kernel," said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of Linux and virtualization engineering, Oracle. “Today's hardware innovations are fast and frequent -- making it very important that the Linux distributions evolve quickly to leverage the latest hardware. With the combination of Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, customers gain fast access to optimizations, new enhancements and bug fixes. "

The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is derived from the stable 2.6.32 mainline Linux kernel. The company points out that Oracle Linux continues to include its existing Red Hat Compatible Kernel. Customers can choose to run the Red Hat Compatible Kernel if they prefer strict Red Hat compatibility over a system optimized to run Oracle and other enterprise software.