Phoronix takes a quick look at the performance of the "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" of Oracle Linux

Over the "Red Hat Compatible Kernel" that Oracle ships that is the same as what's found in RHEL, CentOS, Scientific, etc, they also maintain their own Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. The Oracle UEK isn't based on Linux 2.6.32 but a more recent release (in the case of Oracle Linux 6.5, the Linux 3.8 kernel) plus with various out-of-tree patches like SSD optimizations, NUMA optimizations, and other changes that they say offer more features and better performance.

With my last testing of Oracle Linux with its "UEK" kernel being of the EL 6.1 distributions in late 2011 and then a quick RHEL 6.2 benchmark in early 2012, I decided on Monday to run a quick kernel comparison atop the brand new release of Oracle Linux 6.5.

  Benchmarking Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel