SUSE developers have presented after a year of development the new version of "SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3" which provides 100% binary compatibility of packages with the previously released openSUSE Leap 15.3 distribution, enabling smoother migration to SUSE Linux Enterprise systems running openSUSE and vice versa.
The fact is that a high level of compatibility was achieved thanks to the use of the same set of binary packages in openSUSE as with SUSE Linux Enterprise, instead of the reconstruction of src packages that was practiced previously.
SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3 Key New Features
This new version of the distribution Btrfs utilities have added support for serializing (to perform in turn order) operations that cannot be performed simultaneouslysuch as balancing, removing / adding devices, and resizing file systems. Instead of displaying an error, now similar operations are performed one after another.
It is also highlighted that hotkeys have been added in the installer Ctrl + Alt + Shift + C (in graphical mode) and Ctrl + D Shift + C (in console mode) to display a dialog with additional settings (network configuration, select repositories and switch to expert mode).
It is also highlighted that support for NVIDIA Compute Module has been improved, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) and virtual GPU, in addition to adding support for the Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) virtualization extensions proposed on XNUMXnd generation AMD EPYC processors, which provide transparent encryption of virtual machine memory .
On the part of the kernel we can find that Linux kernel 5.3 continues to be used which still has new hardware support, since optimizations for AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon, Arm and Fujitsu processors were added, including specific optimizations for AMD EPYC 7003 processors, as well as support for Habana Labs Goya AI PCIe cards. Processor (AIP). Added support for NXP i.MX 8M Mini SoC, NXP Layerscape LS1012A, NVIDIA Tegra X1 (T210), and Tegra X2 (T186).
As in the previous version, the desktop is sent GNOME 3.34, to which accumulated bug fixes have been transferred and system packages have been updated, such as Inkscape 1.0.1, Mesa 20.2.4, Firefox 78.10, among many others.
While xca is mentioned in the new utilities (X Certificate and Key Management) for certificate management, with which you can create local CAs, generate, sign and revoke certificates, import and export keys and certificates in PEM, DER and PKCS8 formats.
As well as support for IPSec VPN StrongSwan in NetworkManager (requires the installation of the NetworkManager-strongswan and NetworkManager-strongswan-gnome packages). Deprecated and may be removed in a future release, NetworkManager support for server systems (wicked is used to configure the server network subsystem).
For x86_64 systems, added an idle CPU driver, "haltpoll", which decides when the CPU can be put into deep power saving modes, the deeper the mode, the greater the savings, but it also takes longer to get out of the mode. The new controller is designed for use in virtualization systems and allows the virtual CPU (VCPU) used in the guest system to request additional time before putting the CPU to an idle state. This approach can improve the performance of virtualized applications by preventing the return of control to the hypervisor.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- SELinux support has been added to YaST. During installation, you can now enable SELinux and select "mandatory" or "permissive" mode.
- Includes exfatprogs and bcache-tools packages with utilities for exFAT and BCache.
- Added ability to enable DAX (shortcut) for individual files in Ext4 and XFS
- Added swtpm package with implementation of the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) software emulator.
- Improved support for scripts and profiles in AutoYaST.
- Increased the limit on the maximum number of file descriptors for user processes (RLIMIT_NOFILE).
- The hard limit has been raised from 4096 to 512K, and the soft limit, which can be increased from within the application itself, remains unchanged (1024 descriptors).
- Firewalld adds backend support for using nftables instead of iptables.
- Added support for VPN WireGuard (kernel module and cable protection tools package).
- Linuxrc allows you to send DHCP requests in RFC-2132 format without specifying a MAC address to simplify the maintenance of a large number of hosts.
- Dm-crypt adds support for synchronous mode encryption, enabled with the no-read and no-write queue options in / etc / crypttab.
Source: https://www.suse.com/