On June 21st 2021 SUSE announced SLES 15 SP3 the third service pack for SLES 15. This time no kernel upgrade but still quite a lot of new features for System Z after one year of development:
- Support for OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 in place migration. Move from development to production without a reinstall
- hardware support
- OpenBLAS optimizations for System Z
- libm optimizations for System Z
- Networking
- SMC-D v2 support. Besides other changes this enables SMC-D to be used inside a container
- Due to the kernel update in SLES 15 SP2 there has been a performance degradation with RoCE cards. There is now a workaround documented in the release notes: “To improve performance to the same level as with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 GA, set the following flag for all RoCE ethernet interfaces:
ethtool --set-priv-flags DEVNAME rx_striding_rq. This needs to be done for each RoCE interface and at each boot.” - Support for HiperSockets Converged Interface
- KVM enhancements
- Multiple security and crypto enhancements
- The zdfs filesystem can now read z/OS volumes while they are online in the z/OS LPAR
- Support for IBM Z LPAR fence agent
fence_ibmzfor Pacemaker. This enablesHigh Availability for Linux in LPAR and KVM hosts
The kernel level for SLES 15 SP3 has been updated to 5.3.18-57.3. From SLES 15 SP2 this is a small step but if you plan to upgrade from earlier versions with the 4.x kernel be careful. Check all sour dependencies first! Here is my usual list of useful links for further reading:
- 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.
- OpenSUSE Leap (includes downloads for System Z)