After a year of development, SUSE unveiled the released distribution “SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4” which is formed on the basis of the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform on which products such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, SUSE Manager and SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing are formed.
SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 maintains compatibility Full version of the binary package with the community-driven distribution of openSUSE Leap 15.4, which is scheduled for release tomorrow. A high level of compatibility was achieved by using the same set of binary packages in openSUSE with SUSE Linux Enterprise, rather than rebuilding src packages.
SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 Key New Features
In this new version that is presented, the Linux kernel has been updated to version 5.14, as well as the desktop environment has been updated to GNOME 41 and GTK4 along with which the ability to use a desktop session was provided. based on the Wayland protocol in environments with proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
By default, the kernel disables the ability to run eBPF programs by unprivileged users (the /proc/sys/kernel/unprivileged_bpf_disabled parameter is set) due to the risks of using eBPF to attack the system.
Support has also been implemented for the BTF (BPF Type Format) mechanism, which provides information for type checking in BPF pseudocode.
Besides that, Support for the Intel Alderlake graphics platform has been moved to the i915 driver. For ARM systems, it includes the etnaviv Vivante GPU driver used in several ARM SoCs, such as NXP Layerscape LS1028A/LS1018A and NXP i.MX 8M, as well as the etnaviv_dri library for Mesa.
The ability to enable real-time mode in the kernel is provided for real-time systems by setting the preempt=full parameter during normal SUSE Linux kernel boot. The standalone kernel-preempt package has been removed from the distribution.
Another change that stands out is that Btrfs allowed to use 64K memory pages when working with a filesystem formatted with a block size smaller than the kernel memory page size (for example, FS with 4KB blocks can now be used not only on kernels with the same page size memory).
The kernel includes support for the SVA mechanism (shared virtual addressing) to share virtual addresses between the CPU and peripherals, allowing hardware accelerators to access data structures on the main CPU.
Added Pipewire media server, which is currently only used for screen sharing in Wayland-based environments. For sound, PulseAudio is still used.
The ability to apply live patches to update userspace components, like Glibc and OpenSSL, on the fly. Patching is done without restarting processes, applying patches to in-memory libraries.
Improved compatibility with NVMe drives and added the ability to use advanced features like CDC (Centralized Discovery Controller). The nvme-cli package has been updated to version 2.0. New packages libnvme 1.0 and nvme-stas 1.0 added.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Added support for NVIDIA vGPU 12 and 13
- Official support has been provided for placing swap on a zRAM block device, which provides compressed data storage in RAM.
- Instead of the fbdev drivers used for Framebuffer output, a universal simpledrm driver is proposed that uses the EFI-GOP or VESA framebuffer provided by the UEFI or BIOS firmware for output.
- The composition includes the OpenSSL 3.0 cryptographic library, in addition to the OpenSSL 1.1.1 version used in system applications.
- YaST has improved booting from network drives configured with the "_netdev" option.
- The BlueZ Bluetooth stack has been updated to version 5.62. Added high-quality Bluetooth audio codecs to the pulseaudio package.
- Enabled automatic conversion of System V init.d scripts to systemd services using systemd-sysv-generator. In the next major branch of SUSE, support for init.d scripts will be completely removed and conversion disabled.
- Added support for AMD SEV technology
- The 389 directory server is used as the primary LDAP server. Support for the OpenLDAP server has been discontinued.
- The toolkit for working with LXC containers (libvirt-lxc and virt-sandbox) has been removed.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.
Download and get
The distribution is free to download and use, but access to updates and patches is limited to a 60-day trial period.
The release is available in versions for the aarch64, ppc64le, s390x, and x86_64 architectures.