After a year of development, SUSE has released the SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3 distribution. This platform has given rise to products such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, SUSE Manager, and SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing. The distribution can be downloaded and used for free, but access to updates and patches is limited to a 60-day trial period. The release is available in builds for aarch64, ppc64le, s390x, and x86_64 architectures.
SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3 ensures 100% binary compatibility of packages with the previously released openSUSE Leap 15.3 distribution, allowing for a smooth transition of systems running on OpenSUSE to SUSE Linux Enterprise and vice versa. It is expected that users can initially create and test a production solution based on openSUSE and then switch to the commercial version with full support, SLA, certification, long-term updates, and enhanced tools for large-scale deployment. This high level of compatibility has been achieved through the use of the same set of binary packages in openSUSE as in SUSE Linux Enterprise, rather than the previously practiced rebuilding of source packages.
Key Changes:
- As in the previous release, the Linux 5.3 kernel is continued to be provided, which has been enhanced with support for new hardware. Optimizations have been added for AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon, Arm, and Fujitsu processors, including specific optimizations for AMD EPYC 7003 processors. Support has been added for PCIe boards from Habana Labs Goya AI Processor (AIP). Support for NXP i.MX 8M Mini, NXP Layerscape LS1012A, NVIDIA Tegra X1 (T210), and Tegra X2 (T186) SoCs has been introduced.
- The delivery of kernel modules in compressed form has been implemented.
- The ability to choose eviction modes (PREEMPT) in the scheduler at boot time (preempt=none/voluntary/full) has been provided.
- The ability to save kernel crash dumps in the pstore mechanism, which allows data to be retained in memory areas that are not lost between reboots, has been added.
- The limit on the maximum number of file descriptors for user processes (RLIMIT_NOFILE) has been increased. The hard limit has been raised from 4096 to 512K, while the soft limit, which can be increased from the application itself, remains unchanged (1024 descriptors).
- Support for a backend to use nftables instead of iptables has been added to firewalld.
- Support added VPN WireGuard (the wireguard-tools package and kernel module).
- In linuxrc, sending DHCP requests in RFC-2132 format is supported without specifying a MAC address, simplifying the maintenance of a large number of hosts.
- In dm-crypt, support for synchronous encryption has been added, which can be enabled using the no-read-workqueue and no-write-workqueue options in /etc/crypttab. This new mode offers improved performance compared to the default asynchronous mode.
- Support for NVIDIA Compute Module, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), and Virtual GPU has been enhanced.
- Support for virtualization extensions SEV (Secure Encrypted Virtualization) proposed in the second generation of AMD EPYC processors has been added, providing transparent encryption of virtual machine memory.
- The packages exfatprogs and bcache-tools have been included, providing utilities for exFAT and BCache.
- The ability to enable DAX (Direct Access) for individual files in Ext4 and XFS has been added using the mount option '-o dax=inode' and the FS_XFLAG_DAX flag.
- The Btrfs utilities (btrfsprogs) have added support for serialization (sequencing) of operations that cannot be executed simultaneously, such as rebalance, device removal/addition, and filesystem resizing. Instead of throwing an error, these operations are now executed one after another.
- Hotkeys Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C (in graphical mode) and Ctrl+D Shift+C (in console mode) have been added to the installer for displaying a dialog with additional settings (network configuration, repository selection, and switching to expert mode).
- Support for SELinux has been added to YaST. During installation, SELinux can now be enabled with the 'enforcing' or 'permissive' mode. Support for scripts and profiles in AutoYaST has been improved.
- New versions proposed: GCC 10, glibc 2.31, systemd 246, PostgreSQL 13, MariaDB 10.5, postfix 3.5, nginx 1.19, bluez 5.55, bind 9.16, clamav 0.103, erlang 22.3, NodeJS 14, Python 3.9, rust 1.43, flatpak 1.10, openssh 8.4, QEMU 5.2, samba 4.13, zypper 1.14.43, fwupd 1.5.
- Added: JDBC driver for PostgreSQL, packages nodejs-common, python-kubernetes, python3-kerberos, python-cassandra-driver, python-arrow, compat-libpthread_nonshared, librabbitmq.
- As in the previous release, the GNOME 3.34 desktop is included, with accumulated bug fixes implemented. Updated versions include Inkscape 1.0.1, Mesa 20.2.4, Firefox 78.10.
- A new utility xca (X Certificate and Key Management) has been added to the certificate management toolkit, which allows the creation of local certificate authorities, generation, signing, and revocation of certificates, as well as importing and exporting keys and certificates in PEM, DER, and PKCS8 formats.
- The ability to use the toolkit for managing isolated containers with Podman without root privileges has been added.
- Support for IPSec VPN StrongSwan has been added to NetworkManager (installation of the NetworkManager-strongswan and NetworkManager-strongswan-gnome packages is required). The support for NetworkManager for server systems (for configuring the network subsystem using wicked) is deprecated and may be removed in future releases. servers This is implemented using wicked.
- The wpa_supplicant package has been updated to version 2.9, which has introduced support for WPA3.
- Support for scanners has been expanded; the sane-backends package has been updated to version 1.0.32, which features a new escl backend for scanners compatible with Airprint technology.
- The etnaviv driver for Vivante GPUs used in various ARM SoCs, such as NXP Layerscape LS1028A/LS1018A and NXP i.MX 8M, has been included. For Raspberry Pi boards, the U-Boot bootloader has been utilized.
- In KVM, the maximum memory size for a virtual machine has been increased to 6 TiB. The Xen hypervisor has been updated to version 4.14, libvirt has been updated to version 7.0, and virt-manager has been updated to version 3.2. In virtualization systems without IOMMU, support for more than 256 CPUs in virtual machines has been implemented. The implementation of the Spice protocol has been updated. In spice-gtk, support for mounting ISO images on the client side has been added, clipboard management has been improved, and the backend to PulseAudio has been removed. Official Vagrant Boxes for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (x86-64 and AArch64) have been added.
- The swtpm package, which implements a software emulator for TPM (Trusted Platform Module), has been added.
- For x86_64 systems, a CPU idle handler called 'haltpoll' has been added, which determines when the CPU can be transitioned to deeper energy-saving modes; the deeper the mode, the greater the energy savings, but more time is required to exit the mode. This new handler is designed for use in virtualization systems and allows the virtual CPU (VCPU) in the guest system to request additional time before transitioning the CPU to an idle state. This approach enhances the performance of virtualized applications by preventing the control from returning to the hypervisor.
- The OpenLDAP server has been deprecated and will be removed in SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4, with the 389 Directory Server (package 389-ds) recommended as a replacement. The delivery of OpenLDAP client libraries and utilities will continue.
- Support for LXC container-based tools (packages libvirt-lxc and virt-sandbox) has been declared deprecated and will be discontinued in SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4. Docker or Podman are recommended instead of LXC.
- Support for System V init.d initialization scripts has been declared deprecated, and these scripts will be automatically converted into systemd units.
- TLS 1.1 and 1.0 have been classified as not recommended for use. Support for these protocols may be discontinued in one of the upcoming releases. OpenSSL, GnuTLS, and Mozilla NSS included in the distribution support TLS 1.3.
- The RPM package database (rpmdb) has been migrated from BerkeleyDB to NDB (the Berkeley DB 5.x branch has not been maintained for several years, and the transition to newer releases is hindered by the change in the Berkeley DB 6 license to AGPLv3, the requirements of which also apply to applications using BerkeleyDB as a library — RPM is delivered under GPLv2, and AGPL is incompatible with GPLv2).
- The Bash shell is now available as ‘/usr/bin/bash’ (the ability to invoke it as /bin/bash has been retained).
- The SUSE Linux Enterprise Base Container Images (SLE BCI) toolkit has been proposed for building, delivering, and maintaining container images that contain the minimal set of components based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server necessary to run certain applications in a container (including in Python, Ruby, Perl, etc.).
Source: opennet.ru
