On December 12th 2018, SUSE announced SLES12 SP4 the follow up service pack after SLES 12 SP3. This release comes like SLES 12 SP2 with a major kernel upgrade. This has pros and cons. One of the pros are the new features for System Z:
- More z13 and z14 hardware support
- Many fixes and enhancements for KVM
- Networking: SMC support
- Lot’s of security and crypto enhancements
- and many more enhancements
The kernel level has been updated to 4.12.14-94.41.1. The first maintweb kernel (containing all the urgent fixes that didn’t make GA) is also out 4.12.14-95.3. Especially with the kernel upgrade it’s highly recommended that you install that service right away. Here is my usual list of useful links for further reading:
- SUSE blog post
- Documentation:
- Code is available from SUSE’s downloads sites:
- For packages not included – there are unsupported but specially build packages available at the SUSE package hub.