14 DAY TRIAL // Now that Red Hat launched the fourth point release of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system series, Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux 7 Update 4 for its customers.
Shipping with its optimized Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), as well as the Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK) ,Oracle Linux 7.4 adds various improvements and new features that promise to improve the security and performance of your Oracle Linux 7 operating system, as well as to enhance the support for cloud- and container-based environments.
"The Oracle Linux operating system is an open foundation for the cloud," said Scott Lynn, Product Strategy Director, Oracle Linux. "With the release of Oracle Linux 7 Update 4, we continue to build on the proven enterprise and cloud capabilities of Oracle Linux, allowing you to optimize for today, and prepare for tomorrow."
Here's what's new in Oracle Linux 7.4
Prominent new features of the Oracle Linux 7.4 release include support for booting the operating system on UEFI Secure Boot systems, updated OpenSSH component that supports the SHA-2 algorithm for public key signatures, addition of new NBDE security packages, along with the USBGuard framework for providing systems against USB attacks.
To enhance the security of installing apps, Oracle Linux 7 Update 4 introduces the "payload_gpgcheck" option to the yum command-line package manager. Furthermore, it adds better support for high-performance web apps by introducing the http-parser package, and replaces json-c with the libfastjson package for an extra layer of performance improvements.
Among some of the enhancements that Oracle Linux 7 Update 4 introduces for cloud and container environments, we can mention better support for the next-generation Btrfs file system, a simpler method to install and add a system to a Spacewalk server, as well as user namespace, which prevents container users from gaining any global level privileges.
Under the hood, Oracle Linux 7.4 is powered by Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 4 update 4 (UEK R4u4), specifically kernel-uek-4.1.12-94.3.9.el7uek, but it also ships with kernel-3.10.0-693.el7, which is compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4. Oracle Linux 7.4 is distributed free of charge and you can download it right now from our website or from its official homepage.