Oracle Linux 7 released

Oracle’s has launched Linux 7 which provides users with a freely available enterprise-grade Linux distribution. Oracle Linux 7 is based on the recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL) distribution released June 10.

As Oracle Linux 7 is based on RHEL 7, it inherits many of the same new features.

A major new feature in RHEL 7 is that the XFS file—which enables a file system to scale up to 500 terabytes—is the default. While Oracle Linux 7 also supports XFS, Oracle also integrates the Btrfs file system as a supported component. Btrfs is a next-generation Linux file system that originally got its start at Oracle.

In RHEL 7, the Kernel-mode Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor is the only supported virtualization hypervisor. Red Hat dropped support for the open-source Xen hypervisor when RHEL 6 came out in late 2010. In contrast, Oracle Linux 7 provides support for Xen, which is a primary virtualization technology platform for Oracle. Oracle Linux 7 also supportd Linux Containers (LXC) as well as the open-source Docker container project, which can leverage LXC as a base.

RHEL is a fully supported enterprise Linux distribution that is only supposed to be available to paying subscribers.

Oracle Linux isn’t the only distribution based on RHEL 7. The community CentOS release, which debuted July 7, is also based on RHEL 7.