About Upgrading From a Previous Oracle Linux or UEK Release to UEK R7
UEK R7 is made available for installation on Oracle Linux 8, starting with the Oracle Linux 8.5 release. By default, Oracle Linux 9 ships with UEK R7.
The suggested migration path for upgrading the system from an earlier UEK release to UEK R7 is as follows:
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If you're running Oracle Linux 7 with an earlier UEK release, upgrade the operating system to the latest Oracle Linux 8 release. For instructions on upgrading the Oracle Linux 7 system, see Oracle Linux 8: Upgrading Systems With Leapp.
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If you're running an Oracle Linux 8 release that's earlier than Oracle Linux 8.5 with UEK R6, first upgrade the system to the latest Oracle Linux 8 update release. From here, you can upgrade to UEK R7. If you're already running Oracle Linux 8.5 or later with UEK R6, you can directly upgrade the system to UEK R7.
For instructions on upgrading an Oracle Linux 8 system to Oracle Linux 9, see Oracle Linux 9: Upgrading Systems With Leapp.
Important:
In UEK R7, the default page size for the 64-bit Arm (aarch64) architecture has changed to 4 KB default, from the previous 64 KB default. The new 4 KB default page size might have significant implications on Arm-based systems that are running Oracle Linux 8 with an earlier UEK release, with either a Btrfs or an XFS file system.
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If an Arm-based system uses a Btrfs or an XFS file system, and you're running Oracle Linux 8 with an earlier UEK release, you might not be able to upgrade to UEK R7 without first migrating data to an alternative file system. The default on-disk file system block size is set to be the equivalent of the page size for these file systems, which means that the change in page size can render the file system inaccessible and can cause data corruption.
Note, however, that Oracle has placed checks within the UEK R7 Arm RPM that prevent the installation of UEK R7 if a Btrfs file system is detected and the resulting change in block size could cause data to become inaccessible.
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For an XFS file system, the default block size is 4 KB. XFS enables you to manually set the block size at file system creation time. If you have XFS file systems with a block size greater than 4 KB, you're required to migrate data before upgrading to UEK R7.
Typically, a data migration plan might involve adding another storage device, formatting it with an unaffected file system or using XFS with the block size specified as 4 KB, and then moving the data onto the newly formatted device.
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Users of the Oracle Linux 8 developer image installed on Raspberry Pi systems are necessarily affected because the image uses a Btrfs file system, by default. If you're using this image, and you intend to upgrade to UEK R7, you must migrate data to an alternative unaffected file system before trying to install UEK R7. For more information about using the Raspberry Pi hardware platform, see Install Oracle Linux on a Raspberry Pi.
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Any existing swap partitions that were created on the Arm platform using an earlier UEK release, such as UEK R6, don't work after upgrading to UEK R7. The change to a 4 KB default page size on the aarch64 platform requires that any existing swap partitions on the system must be reinitialized with the new page size after booting the system with UEK R7. For further details, see Swap partitions created on Arm platform using an earlier UEK release don't work after upgrade to UEK R7.