About the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel

The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) is a Linux kernel built by Oracle and supported through Oracle Linux support. UEK is tested on Arm (aarch64), Intel® x86, and AMD x86 (x86_64) platforms. Each release contains added features, bug fixes, and updated drivers to provide support for key functional requirements, improve performance, and optimize the kernel for use on Oracle products such as Oracle's Engineered Systems, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and large enterprise deployments for Oracle customers.

Typically, a UEK release contains changes to the kernel ABI relative to a previous UEK release. These changes require recompilation of third-party kernel modules on the system. To minimize impact on interoperability during releases, the Oracle Linux team works with third-party vendors regarding hardware and software that have dependencies on kernel modules. Thus, before installing the latest UEK release, verify its support status with the application vendor.

The kernel ABI for a UEK release remains unchanged in all later updates to the initial release.

The kernel source code for UEK is available after the initial release through a public git source code repository at https://github.com/oracle/linux-uek.

For more information about UEK such as tutorials, notices, and release notes of different UEK versions, go to Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel documentation.