14 DAY TRIAL // Oracle Linux 6.1, Oracle's Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, is now available for download, just a couple of weeks after RHEL 6.1 became available. Since Oracle doesn't stray too much from the original, there aren't any big changes compared to RHEL 6.1, apart from Oracle's own "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" being used by default.
"Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux 6.1 for x86 (32 bit) and x86_64 (64 bit) architectures," Oracle announced.
"Oracle Linux 6.1 ships with two sets of kernel packages: Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel installed and booted by default; Red Hat compatible Kernel installed by default," it added.
Oracle bundles its own kernel version, for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, and makes it the default used, however, the RHEL kernel is there as well and can be used by selecting it at boot.
Updates in Oracle Linux Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel:
· improved IRQ balancing; · reduced lock contention across the kernel; · improved network I/O via receive packet steering and RDS improvements; · improved virtual memory performance.
Otherwise, Oracle Linux 6.1 is very much a Red Hat Enterprise Clone, in the vein of CentOS. Unlike CentOS though, which is a community effort, Oracle Linux has all of Oracle's might behind it, so versions are brought on par very quickly.
Oracle Linux 6.1 removes all of the Red Hat branding, the logos and the regular release notes replacing them with its own. It also modifies some of the packages to remove mentions of Red Hat, repositories and so on.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, the first update to the latest and greatest RHEL, brought some minor improvements and some new features, but it was mostly a bug fixing and stability release.
Oracle Linux 6.1 is available for download here on Softpedia.