Oracle cozies up to IBM, adds Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Oracle may offer its own Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compatible operating system, but clearly not all public cloud developers are happy with the company's "Unbreakable" kernel and would prefer the real thing. On Tuesday the two companies announced a joint agreement to offer RHEL and support as an image on Oracle Cloud …

[Bebu]

Better dead than red :)

I might be a cynical sod but I am certain anything these two companies do won't end up costing customers less.

I was looking at Redhat's "Simple Content Access" and equally cynically wonder whether this will expose their customers to Oracle style licensing roulette? Or the Javarization of downstream distros like Alma/Rocky/Springdale Linux ie if you have a Redhat subscription then these derivatives are also deemed to count towards total licenses required?

"Just Say No" :)

[jake]

Re: Better dead than red :)

It certainly sounds like something that should be avoided at all costs, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, the suits will probably be all over it, so I guess I'll have to take in and digest the gory details. The only way to argue logically against something is to understand it.

Thanks for the heads-up, ElReg.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Better dead than red :)

We use Simple Content Access and it has actually been a great benefit to us.

It's a way of *accurately* assesing exactly how many Subscriptions your estate is consuming; and has prevented a situation we have run into in the past where you run out of subscriptions on your Satellite manifest and that prevents you commissioning new machines.

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat's playbook?

Always thought Oracle Linux was just CentOS with a bit of tweaking.

Now with CentOS being a beta version to RHEL, I'm guessing Oracle's customers are up in arms (well, the customers IT department anyway)

[chasil]

"Unbreakable" UEK

The Oracle "Unbreakable" Enterprise Kernel (UEK) is actually far superior to RedHat's for several reasons.

It adds full support for btrfs. RedHat explicitly removes this from Fedora, for motivations that are not clear at this point.

RedHat also removes many drivers and supported devices from later kernels, which the UEK retains. SATA RAID cards are notably back among other deprecated devices and modules, with no need to go to El Repo for a tainted driver.

The latest UEKs are all v5 kernels, much better than the v3 and v4 that we see on RedHat 7 and 8.

This does solve many different classes of problems on the platform, even when loaded into an upstream OS.

[Lost Neutrino]

Re: "Unbreakable" UEK

Just as a side note: btfrs is also included/supported in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

RHEL and Oracle are not the only kids on the enterprise infrastructure block. SLES is often forgotten in these type of conversations. Which is a shame, as it is also very good and capable.