On December 9th 2019, SUSE announced SLES12 SP5 the follow up service pack after SLES 12 SP4. This release is the last service pack of SLES12. The new features for System Z include:
- First z15 support in compiler, binutils and kernel and zlib compression support
- Networking: OSA7 and full TCP offload support for layer 2
- Lot’s of security and crypto enhancements including finally the tool zcryptstats to monitor the crypto adapters also from Linux
- For storage the new persistent device configuration tools (chzdev and lszdev) have been integrated int the SUSE tooling
- KVM got a lot of new functionality: dedicated crypto adapter domains for guests, z15 support, ….
The kernel level has been updated to 4.12.14-120.1. The first maintweb kernel, which contains all the urgent fixes that didn’t make GA, is also out. The version is 4.12.14-122.7.1. 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 for their z15 support
- 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.