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Comment by sciurus | Hacker News Reader

The advantage of Oracle Linux that I see is the newer supported kernel version, On both Oracle Linux 5 and 6 you get 3.0, compared to 2.6.18 for RHEL5 and 2.6.32 for RHEL6.

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Are you sure about this? the public repo seems to show 2.6.18/2.6.32.. This would actually be a dis-advantage in many cases, as a number of vendor utils (I'm looking at you HP) don't play nice w/ 3.x kernels.

They have the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), as well as a RHEL-compatible kernel. I'm not sure which is the default in new installs.

https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/entry/oracle_unbreakable_ente...

From the release notes: "By default, both the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and the Red Hat Compatible Kernel are installed on the x86_64 (64 bit) platform, and the system boots the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel by default. If needed, /etc/grub.conf can be modifed to make the system boot with the Red Hat Compatible Kernel by default."

https://oss.oracle.com/el6/docs/RELEASE-NOTES-GA-en.html

So for the avoidance of doubt, the CentOS upgrade script will preserve the RHEL/CentOS 2.6.32.x kernel, but a fresh install from the netboot or dvd will install the UEK 3.0 install?

Correct.

Debian Squeeze is on 2.6.32 and, in my opinion, it is solid as a rock. If your hardware works, I don't see why you would want to upgrade the kernel (besides potential security fixes).

So if one were to run the script mentioned on the landing page that we are discussing, the result would be a kernel change on a server?

Disclaimer: I do not support servers, I just have an interest in CentOS/SL on the desktop.

Absolutely not!

(The confusion stems from the fact that Oracle also has the "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel", which it also offers, but you need to explicitly install that with the "kernel-uek" package.)

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