Oracle Linux 7.4 is released. No official press release yet, but the 'Latest packages for Oracle Linux 7 (x86_64)' repository is synced and ready to go (tested).
Very nice - haven't played with Oracle Linux in ages Centmin Mod use to be tested and developed for Oracle Linux, but haven't done so since CentOS 7 was released.
Oracle Linux 7 is compatible with RHEL 7, although more and more differences between those 2. Oracle is fixing bugs on its own (not waiting on upstream). Then you have UEK etc etc.
Yeah UEK was why started playing with Oracle Linux for 3.10 kernels prior to CentOS 7 release. But once CentOS 7 came out didn't bother and well Linode has 4.9.36+ Kernels as well
They only reason Oracle started with UEK originally, was the fact that Red Hat closed the kernel source as of EL6. Red Hat only delivers the tarball now and no patches or other plain code. Not possible to support customers with your external forked product if you can't analyse the code. I do understand it. For example Oracle, they simply download the SRPM files, rebuild it and deals with your customers.
Indeed much harder. I haven't followed Oracle UEK development in ages though so not sure what it has that CentOS 7 Linux Kernels don't these days.
UEK 7 does have the following what EL7 does not have: Xen, LXC containers, real-time kernel out of the box (EL does have its own rt kernel for that), Oracle hardware (SUN).