On April 23, 2025, OS Management reaches end of life (EOL). Effective now, the service is no longer available to you in regions where you are not already using OS Management, or to new users with new tenancies. Before the EOL date, we recommend that you migrate your managed instances to the OS Management Hub service. If you are an Oracle Autonomous Linux user, see Important Maintenance Event. For more information, see the Service Change Announcement.

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Autonomous Linux Overview

Oracle Autonomous Linux is a managed service for reducing the complexity and overhead of common operating system management tasks.

Important

The Autonomous Linux service has different dependencies on other Oracle Cloud services for providing and managing autonomous updates. One of the services that the Autonomous Linux service depends on for delivering autonomous updates has been redesigned with an updated architecture.

If you launched an instance with an Autonomous Linux image published after April 24, 2024 (Oracle-Autonomous-Linux-8.9-2024.04.19-0 or Oracle-Autonomous-Linux-7.9-2024.04.19-0), no further action is required.

If you launched an instance before April 24, 2024 using an older Autonomous Linux image, follow the steps in Important Maintenance Event.

Autonomous Linux provides the following features:

  • Automatic daily updates, including zero-downtime Ksplice updates for kernel, OpenSSL, and glibc libraries.
  • Monitoring for critical events, such as a kernel oops or kernel crashes, including collecting and submitting the messages and logs needed to debug and provide a root cause analysis of the event.

Autonomous Linux Components and Features

Review the following components and features to help you get started with Autonomous Linux.

Autonomous Linux Instance
An instance that is managed by Autonomous Linux service is referred to as an Autonomous Linux instance. Autonomous Linux instances are integrated with the OS Management service.
Oracle Autonomous Linux Plugin
The Autonomous Linux service uses the Oracle Autonomous Linux plugin for managing autonomous updates and collecting data associated with events, including logs and stack traces. The Oracle Cloud Agent manages the Oracle Autonomous Linux plugin. For more information about the Oracle Cloud Agent, see Managing Plugins with Oracle Cloud Agent.
Note

The Autonomous Linux service requires that both the Oracle Autonomous Linux and OS Management Service Agent plugins are installed and running on Autonomous Linux instances. The OS Management Service Agent plugin is responsible for starting the Oracle Autonomous Linux plugin. For more information, see Getting Started with Autonomous Linux.
Autonomous Updates

Autonomous Linux provides automatic daily updates (including zero-downtime Ksplice updates for kernel, OpenSSL, and glibc libraries) to Autonomous Linux instances. These updates are referred to as autonomous updates. When you create an Autonomous Linux instance, the service automatically creates a controlled scheduled job for autonomous updates. You can update the start time for the daily autonomous updates using the Console, CLI, or API.

For more information about autonomous updates, see Managing Autonomous Linux Settings.

Events

Autonomous Linux provides instance monitoring that captures events to help quickly identify and debug anomalies, errors, and failures in the operating system. Some examples of supported events, include critical events, such as kernel oops and kernel crashes. Information about the events can be viewed using the Console, CLI, or API.

For more information about events, see Understanding Autonomous Linux Events.

Event Collection

Autonomous Linux collects information about events, including important stack trace information and log files, that can be used for triage. A summary of the report can be viewed in the Console or can be downloaded in a zip file for triage. You can control how the Autonomous Linux service stores the collected files by editing the event collection setting.

For more information about the information collected for an instance, see About the Information Collected from an Instance.

Notifications

Autonomous Linux uses Notifications service topics to send out notifications about autonomous updates and events. Autonomous Linux provides capabilities to set the topic for instances using the Console, CLI, or API.

Note

We highly recommend that you set up event notifications for Autonomous Linux instances.

For more information about using Notifications topics with Autonomous Linux, see Managing Autonomous Linux Settings. For general information about the Notifications service, see Overview of Notifications.

Authorization and Authentication

Each service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integrates with IAM for authentication and authorization, for all interfaces (the Console, SDK or CLI, and REST API).

An administrator in your organization needs to set up groups, compartments, and policies that control which users can access which services, which resources, and the type of access. For example, the policies control who can create new users, create and manage the cloud network, launch instances, create buckets, download objects, etc. For more information, see Getting Started with Policies. For specific details about writing policies for Autonomous Linux, see Setting Up Required IAM Policies for Autonomous Linux and OS Management Policy Reference.

If you’re a regular user (not an administrator) who needs to use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources that your company owns, contact your administrator to set up a user ID for you. The administrator can confirm which compartment or compartments you should be using.

Ways to Access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

You can access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using the Console (a browser-based interface) or the REST API. Instructions for the Console and API are included in topics throughout this guide. For a list of available SDKs, see Software Development Kits and Command Line Interface.

To access the Console, you must use a supported browser. You can use the Console link at the top of this page to go to the sign-in page. You will be prompted to enter your cloud tenant, your user name, and your password.

For general information about using the API, see REST APIs.

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