SUSE has released the third prototype of the ALP 'Piz Bernina' (Adaptable Linux Platform), positioned as a continuation of the SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution. A key feature of ALP is the separation of the distribution's core into two parts: a slimmed down 'host OS' for running directly on hardware, and a layer for application support, focused on running in containers and virtual machines. ALP is initially being developed using an open development process, with intermediate builds and testing results publicly available to all interested parties. <\/p>\n
The third prototype includes two separate branches, which are currently similar in terms of their core, but will evolve towards different areas of application with different provided services in the future. The Bedrock branch, aimed at use in server systems, and the Micro branch, designed for building cloud-native systems and running microservices, are available for testing. Ready builds are prepared for the x86_64 architecture (Bedrock, Micro). Additionally, build scripts (Bedrock, Micro) are available for Aarch64, PPC64le, and s390x architectures. <\/p>\n
The architecture of ALP is based on the development of the 'host OS' environment, which is the minimum required to support and manage hardware. All user space applications and components are proposed to run not in a mixed environment, but in separate containers or virtual machines<\/a>, executed on top of the 'host OS' and isolated from one another. This organization will allow users to focus on applications and abstract workflows, separating them from the low-level system environment and hardware. <\/p>\n The 'host OS' is based on the SLE Micro product, which is built on the developments of the MicroOS project. For centralized management, configuration management systems Salt (pre-installed) and Ansible (optional) are offered. For running isolated containers, Podman and K3s (Kubernetes) tools are available. Among the system components moved to containers are yast2, podman, k3s, cockpit, GDM (GNOME Display Manager), and KVM. <\/p>\n Among the features of the system environment is the default use of disk encryption (FDE, Full Disk Encryption) with the option to store keys in TPM. The root partition is mounted in read-only mode and is not modified during operation. An atomic update installation mechanism is used in the environment. Unlike atomic updates based on ostree and snap used in Fedora and Ubuntu, ALP utilizes the standard package manager and snapshot mechanism in Btrfs instead of building separate atomic images and deploying additional delivery infrastructure. <\/p>\n A customizable automatic update installation mode is provided (for example, it is possible to enable auto-installation only for critical vulnerability patches or to revert to manual confirmation of update installations). Live patches are supported for updating the Linux kernel without rebooting and without interrupting operations. To maintain system resilience (self-healing), the last stable state is recorded using Btrfs snapshots (if anomalies are detected after applying updates or changing settings, the system automatically reverts to the previous state). <\/p>\n The platform utilizes a multi-version software stack \u2014 thanks to the use of containers, different versions of tools and applications can be used simultaneously. For example, applications that depend on different versions of Python, Java, and Node.js can run, isolating incompatible dependencies from each other. The base dependencies are provided as sets of BCI (Base Container Images). Users can create, update, and delete software stacks without affecting other environments. <\/p>\n The D-Installer is used for installation, where the user interface is separated from the internal components of YaST and various front-ends can be used, including a front-end for managing installation through a web interface. Clients of YaST (bootloader, iSCSIClient, Kdump, firewall, etc.) can be run in separate containers. <\/p>\n Key changes in the third prototype of ALP: <\/p>\n\n