Oracle has announced the release of Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (2.6.39). This is Oracle’s second major release of its optimized operating system kernel for Oracle Linux 5 and Oracle Linux 6.

According to Oracle’s Linux Blog, the RPM packages are now available from the Unbreakable Linux Network and the public yum repositories. This kernel can be installed on both Oracle Linux 5.8 and newer as well as Oracle Linux 6.2 and newer. By simply updating the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, Oracle Linux customers can benefit from the latest improvements without having to re-install their distribution or applications.

According to the announcement, the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 is based on mainline Linux 3.0.16 and includes a few selected patches from other mainline Linux versions. The source code is available from the public git source code repository. Some key features of this release include: Btrfs filesystem, improvements in performance, scalability, and virtualization, transparent “Huge Pages” and memory compaction, improvements to Cgroups and OCFS2, Linux Containers, and updated device drivers.

More information is available from the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 features and benefits document.