On June 24th 2019, one year after the first release, SUSE announced SLES15 SP1 the first service pack for SLES 15. This release adds many new features for System Z and also for using SLES15 SP1 as a KVM host and guest! So we have
- z14 support and performance support for pervasive encryption:
- OpenSSL exploitation of the new ciphers, especially AES-GCM
- LUKS2 support
- performance enhancement with 4k support for dm-crypt
- performance enhancement for other ciphers e.g. ChaCha20 using new SIMD instructions
- CEX6 support
- z14 CPUMF counter support in perf tool
- KVM
- kvm_stat support for performance monitoring
- dedicated crypto domains for guests
- support for huge pages in the guest
- Networking
- SMC-D/R support
- IPv6 checksum and segmentation offload
The kernel level has been updated to 4.12.14-195.1. The first maintweb kernel (containing all the urgent fixes that didn’t make GA) is also out 4.12.14-197.7. Here is my usual list of useful links for further reading:
- SUSE certifications (carried over from SLES 15):
- 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. As of 7/23 there are 7744 packages for s390x available.
(updated 7/23/2019)