Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Getting Started with Autonomous Linux

Get started with Autonomous Linux by ensuring service prerequisites are met before registering instances.

Supported Environments

Autonomous Linux can manage OCI instances. Autonomous Linux provides updates as they're made available by OS vendors. Available updates are subject to the vendor's OS lifecycle programs.

Tenancy Requirements

  • Autonomous Linux requires an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy.
  • Autonomous Linux isn't available on the Oracle Cloud Free Tier.

Supported OS Versions

  • Oracle Autonomous Linux 7
  • Oracle Autonomous Linux 8
Important

Autonomous Linux requires minimum Oracle Cloud Agent version 1.40. For instances using platform images released before April 2024, upgrade the Oracle Cloud Agent to 1.40 or later.

Compartment Considerations

You can specify which compartment the following resources reside in. This can be useful to limit access to resources on a per compartment basis.

  • Profiles: Service-provided profiles and default profiles always reside in the root compartment. All other profiles can reside in any compartment. See Understanding Profiles.
  • Groups: Can reside in any compartment.

Best Practices

When creating groups, limit instance members to the same compartment as the group. Autonomous Linux displays instance members, jobs, and reports for a single compartment at a time. When all instance members are in the same compartment, you have a direct view of all members, jobs, and reports associated with the group.

If instance members are in several compartments, your view of instances, jobs, and reports is limited to the selected compartment. You must change the compartment scope when viewing members, examining job logs, and running reports. For example, when looking at a job for a multi-compartment group, you would need to change compartments to view all the associated children jobs. Additionally, depending on your policies, a user might not have permissions to all the compartments for the instance members. These users will have an incomplete view of the group.

Moving Resources Between Compartments

You can move most resources between compartments within the same region of your tenancy. However, any scheduled jobs associated with the resource don't move to the destination compartment. They continue to reside in the source compartment. For example, if you move a group, any scheduled jobs associated with the group remain in the old compartment.

Before moving resources, verify that policies and permissions are correctly set so that you don't accidentally lose access to the resource.

To move resources, see:

For general information about moving resources between compartments in OCI, see Moving Resources Between Compartments.

Required IAM Policies

Important

Autonomous Linux uses OS Management Hub to manage instances. Follow the OS Management Hub policy guidance for dynamic group rules and policies required for OCI instances.

In addition, add the following policies to allow the use of notifications in Autonomous Linux.

To allow the Autonomous Linux service to publish notifications:

Allow any-user to use ons-topics in tenancy where request.principal.type='alx-notification'
Tenancy-level policies

To allow the user to create and use notification topics:

allow group <user_group> to manage ons-topics in tenancy
Compartment-level policies (if not using tenancy-level)

If the tenancy administrator doesn't permit setting IAM policies at the tenancy level, you can restrict the use of Autonomous Linux resources to a compartment and its subcompartments (policies use compartment inheritance).

To allow the user to create and use notification topics in a compartment inside the tenancy:

allow group <user_group> to manage ons-topics in compartment <compartment_name>

Software Source Considerations

Software sources are software repositories which provide packages and module streams to instances registered with Autonomous Linux.

Use OS Management Hub to add, create, or modify software sources. Software sources available in OS Management Hub are available to instances in the Autonomous Linux service. See Managing Software Sources in OS Management Hub.

Mandatory Software Sources

Autonomous Linux instances have a minimum set of required software sources automatically attached to them when they register with the service. When you register your first Autonomous Linux instance, these required software sources are automatically added to OS Management Hub if they aren't already available. You can't detach these required software sources from the instance, but can attach or detach other software sources.

Minimum required software sources:

Oracle Linux 7
Name Description
ol7_ksplice-x86_64 Ksplice for Oracle Linux 7 (x86_64)
ol7_latest-x86_64 Oracle Linux 7 Server Latest (x86_64)
ol7_oci_included-x86_64 Oracle Software for OCI users on Oracle Linux 7 (x86_64)
ol7_optional_latest-x86_64 Oracle Linux 7 Server Optional Latest (x86_64)
ol7_software_collections-x86_64 Software Collection Library release 3.0 packages for Oracle Linux 7 (x86_64)
ol7_uekr6-x86_64 Latest Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6 for Oracle Linux 7 Server (x86_64)
ol7_x86_64_userspace_ksplice-x86_64 Ksplice aware userspace packages for Oracle Linux 7 Server (x86_64)
Oracle Linux 8
Name Description
ol8_addons-x86_64 Oracle Linux 8 Addons (x86_64)
ol8_appstream-x86_64 Oracle Linux 8 Application Stream (x86_64)
ol8_baseos_latest-x86_64 Oracle Linux 8 BaseOS Latest (x86_64)
ol8_ksplice-x86_64 Ksplice for Oracle Linux 8 (x86_64)
ol8_oci_included-x86_64 Oracle Software for OCI users on Oracle Linux 8 (x86_64)
ol8_uekr7-x86_64 Oracle Linux 8 UEK Release 7 (x86_64)
ol8_x86_64_userspace_ksplice-x86_64 Ksplice aware userspace packages for Oracle Linux 8 (x86_64)

What's Next

  1. (Optional) Create a profile to register an instance with the content associated with specific software sources or a group.
  2. Register an instance with the Autonomous Linux service.