Good morning Incorrigible,
I don't really think the idea here is so much to be selling a distribution, but rather to have an in-house distribution that oracle can use as a 'supported' linux stack on which to run oracle.
There are tons of parameters that can be tuned in the kernel, some of which can have positive or negative effects on how an Oracle database might perform.
It's kind of like the way that Oracle implements Apache support today. When you install Oracle Apache, it is their own version, compiled their way, with their own funky file locations (and I do mean really funky file locations). They know how their installer sets up apache to work with their product, and they will support that. Can you use a generic Apache with Oracle? Sure, but don't ask Oracle anything about it if it doesn't work.
I dont know that that is such a huge deal the kernel parameters oracle needs changed are run time tunable. you could use a script with cat, or modules.conf to set them up. But youre right in that if they dont get done its trouble.
This has less to do with Oracle needing a more compliant Linux and more to do with sticking it to RedHat
Yep, it's all about the stack.