Red Hat doesn't change as little as possible, at least 30% of the changes to Linux make it to RHEL.
Most of the RHEL kernel is a few months behind upstream despite the old version. The next minor release of RHEL, to be released in November, probably will have features up to 6.3 for many subsystems and bugfixes up to 6.5 for example.
Interesting, thank you for the details. This means that in some way, RHEL is ahead of Oracle Linux in terms of kernels? I don't see an UEK version tracking Linux 6.1 at all, AFAIK.
It's true that Red Hat does pull in changes from upstream for several subsystems of Linux. It's genuinely a frankenkernel mixed with code from 6.3, 6.1, etc.
But you're still beholden to what the Red Hat maintainers are pulling in and focusing on. It's still not a general follow upstream wholesale.
You can see and track what UEK is doing by looking at their Github: https://github.com/oracle/linux-uek/commits/uek7/u1
See here for an article that describes how it's done --> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36763935
To be clear, I only used Oracle Linux briefly while playing with the free tier of Oracle Cloud.
Edit: sorry, but I don't get it, please break it down for me. Latest UEK 7 is based off 5.15 LTS ( https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/uek/ ), that puts them at branching off a kernel released on 2021-10-31 (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history#R... ). How is that even remotely 4 weeks behind master?!
Edit 2: my bad, I didn't read the "behind the tip of the LTS tree" part carefully. So, the difference is that Oracle tries to ship all LTS kernel updates, while RH tries to cherry-pick critical security and bug fixes only?