Release Notes for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 4

Provide all maintenance fixes (see Chapter 2, Driver Updates) released since GA of SLES 10.

Provide an easy update (see README) of your system or individual packages to the latest Service Pack level. This is especially useful if you cannot use online update mechanisms.

Provide an easy fresh install (see README) using the latest kernel, drivers, and installer updates.

Include PTFs (special fixes for customers) which were folded back into the SLES 10 common code base making them part of the maintained code base.

Provide useful additional information and documentation (see Chapter 4, Installation-Related Notes).

ntp was updated to version 4.2.8.

In addition to xntp, ntp (version 4.2.8) is now also available on the SLE 10 plattform.

In security critical environments, consider to remove xntp, switch to ntp, and adjust your configuration.

These are the most important differences:

Parameter changes

The meaning of some parameters for the sntp commandline tool have changed or have been dropped, for example sntp -s is now sntp -S. Review any sntp usage in your own scripts for required changes.

After having been deprecated for several years, ntpdc is now disabled by default for security reasons. It can be re-enabled by adding the line enable mode7 to /etc/ntp.conf, but preferably ntpq should be used instead.

With ntp on SLE 10 , do not use yast2-ntp-client for configuration.

Performance Co-Pilot (package pcp) was updated to version 3.6.10. This update obsoletes libpcp.so.2. As a result, any in-house or third-party applications developed using libpcp.so.2 will need to be re-based against libpcp.so.3.

The new library and corresponding development header files are provided as part of the libpcp3-3.6.10 and pcp-devel-3.6.10 packages.

On SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 4 the packages coreutils, gdb and nagios-plugins contain code which is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3.

Added libservicelog and servicelog to provide support for serviceability and server management tools. Customer can query servicelog for events requiring attention like failing PCI card (IBM POWER).

Added libvpd2.

Added ppc64-diag on POWER to provide an API and tools by which external serviceability and diagnostics can access Vital Product Data, consisting of hardware present on a system, the characteristics of that hardware, and hardware state.

Added vhostmd on i586 and x86-64.

Added mozilla-xulrunner192 for MozillaFirefox 3.6.

Firefox was updated to version 24 ESR.

This update also brings updates of Mozilla NSPR and Mozilla NSS libraries. Mozilla NSS libraries contain cryptographic enhancements, including TLS 1.2 support.

It comes with PDF.js, which now replaces the Acroread PDF plugin.

Added openssl-certs, which contains additional CA certificates for openssl.

Added sces-client, a client for the SUSE Cloud License Manager.

Added suse-ami-tools for running SUSE Linux Enterprise on Amazon EC2.

Updated bind to version 9.5.2-P4.

Updated samba to version 3.4.

Updated ia32el

Updated clamav to version 0.96.1.

Updated gdb to version 7.1.

Updated OFED tools to latest 1.4 and/or 1.5.2 release.

Updated iprutils to version 2.3.2 to support 6GB SAS RAID on Power7.

Updated openssh to version 5.1p1.

Updated IBM Javas to latest service releases.

Updated sblim-cim-client to version 1.3.9.1. Includes new support for IPv6, TLS and DBCS authentication.

Ext2/Ext3 utilities were fixed for filesytems larger than 8TB.

Refreshed openssl-ibmca for hardware crypto 4K keys usage (IBM System z).

Additional 31bit compat library for c++ Boost to enable use of TM1/Cognos OLAP (IBM System z).

zipl integration of device mapper devices (IBM System z).

Allow installation of and booting from a boot record on logical devices, i.e. devices managed by device mapper or multipath devices. These setups must confirm to a set of rules: physical device is of type DASD or SCSI, all blocks on the logical device correspond to blocks on the same physical device, adjacent blocks on the logical device correspond to adjacent blocks on the physical device, access to block 0 of the physical device.

snIPL enhancement to trigger SCSI dump on remote container (IBM System z)

Configurable dump and IPL parameters to prevent infinite panic-dump-ipl loop (IBM System z)

Librtas was updated for new RTAS event fields on IBM POWER. These updates allow customers that decipher RTAS events to properly see this new information.

Power7 & ISA 2.06 support on IBM POWER. Detect POWER7 as a platform for potential user space application acceleration.

powerpc-utils update for Power7 (IBM POWER). Allows customers to tune application to exploit simultaneous multithreading usage for the best performance.

Updated lsvpd to version 1.6.7.

Installation using Persistent Device names

If you plan to add additional storage devices to your system after the OS installation, we strongly recommend to use persistent device names for all storage devices during installation. The installer by default uses the kernel device names.

How to proceed:

During installation, enter the partitioner. For each partition, select "Edit" and go to the "FStab Options" dialog. Any mount option except "Device name" provide you persistent devicenames.

To switch an already installed system to using persistent device names, proceed as described above for all existing partitions. In addition, rerun the boot loader module in YaST to switch the bootloader to using the persistent device name also. Just start the module and select "Finish" to write the new proposed configuration to disk. This needs to be done before adding new storage devices.

For further information please look at http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Persistent_storage_device_names.

Network-based root file systems must not be accessed through a bridge device.

Booting a network-based filesystem (e.g. iSCSI) that is accessed through a bridge does not work. The workaround is to create a networkpath that does not go through a bridge.

MD Devices on top of iSCSI not possible

iSCSI devices cannot be used for Linux Software RAID. Using MD devices on top of iSCSI triggers a cyclic dependency that leads to a crash.

Using qla3xxx and qla4xxx driver at the same time

QLogic iSCSI Expansion Card for IBM BladeCenter provides both Ethernet and iSCSI functions. Some parts on the card are shared by both functions. The current qla3xxx (ethernet) and qla4xxx (iSCSI) drivers support Ethernet and iSCSI function individually. They do not support using both functions at the same time. Using both Ethernet and iSCSI functions at the same time may hang the device and cause data lost and filesystem corruptions on iSCSI devices or network disruptions on Ethernet.

Using iSCSI Disks When Installing

To use iSCSI disks during installation it is necessary to add the following parameter to the kernel parameter line: withiscsi=1

During installation, an additional screen appears that provides the possibility to attach iSCSI disks to the system and use them in the installation process.

Since SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 booting from an iSCSI server on i386, x86_64 and ppc is supported, when an iSCSI enabled firmware is used.

On ppc, a single bootfile (zImage.initrd) instead of yaboot is used.

Using EDD Information for Storage Device Identification

If you want to use EDD information (/sys/firmware/edd/<device>) to identify your storage devices, change the installer default settings using an additional kernel parameter.

Requirements:

Procedure:

Automatic installation with Autoyast in an LPAR (System z)

For automatic installation with Autoyast in an LPAR, it is required, that the parmfile used for such an installation has blank characters at the beginning and the end of each line (the first line need not to start with a blank). The number of character in one line should not exceed 80 characters.

linuxrc doesn't accept its proposed default values in System z LPAR installation

Pressing "Send" (enter) in linuxrc to confirm the proposed default value leads to no input. This can cause "*** Invalid Input." errors.

Recommendation: When running linuxrc in a System z LPAR console, instead of pressing "Send" (enter) to take the proposed default value, enter the value explicitly.

Adding DASD or zFCP disks during installation (System z)

The adding of DASD or zFCP disks is not only possible during the installation workflow, but also when the installation proposal is shown. To add disks at that stage please click on the "Expert" tab and scroll down. There the DASD and/or zFCP entry is shown. These added disks are not shown in the partitioner. To get the disks into the partitioner, you have to click on the expert label and select "reread partition table". This may reset any previously entered information.

Creating LVM or EVMS Volumes with DASDs (System z)

If want to create a LVM or EVMS volume with DASDs that are not formatted or partitioned this will fail. The DASDs can be formatted in the DASD activation panel. Creating a partition can be done in the partitioner by hitting the [create] button and specifying "do not format" and removing any mountpoints indicated.

Installation loops during network configuration if incorrect or incomplete parameters are entered. (System z)

In case of an erroneous configuration of a (e.g. qeth) device, the device does not get ungrouped automatically.

Perform the following steps to recover from a network device setup failure:

Now you are ready to retry the network setup.

cxgb3 Adapter Support During Installation

If support for the cxgb3 adapter is required during the installation phase already, please make sure to also select the packages "ofed-1.4.1" and "ofed-kmp-ppc64-1.3.1" in the package selection of the installer.

Hot-Add of Memory

Hot-Add-memory is currently only supported on the following machines:

If your machine is not listed, please call support, whether the machine has been successfully tested. Else a maintenance update will explicitly mention the general availability of this feature.

Huge Page Memory support via HMC on POWER

Huge Page Memory support (16GB pages, enabled via HMC) is not yet supported under Linux. Problems occur if huge pages are assigned to a partition in combination with eHEA / eHCA adapters. eHEA: Network interfaces can't be setup if huge page memory is assigned to the same partition.

libhugetlbfs

The libhugetlbfs project shipped with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 is a preview of application provision with transparent access to system huge pages. While the library provides an application with easy access to huge pages when sufficient huge pages have been previously allocated on the system, additional development and testing is required to provide a stable transition to normal pages in a production environment.

Read-Only Root Filesystem

It is possible to run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Service Pack 2 on on a read-only root filesystem. Due to the huge number of possible configurations, this is currently not a supported scenario.

The /tmp and /var/tmp directories needs to be on a separate partition and cannot be mounted read-only.

After the installation has finished and all services are configured, login as root and do the following modifications:

Modify /etc/fstab and add "ro" to the mount options of the root filesystem entry.

   rm /etc/mtab
   ln -s /proc/mounts /etc/mtab
   mkdir /var/lib/hwclock
   mv /etc/adjtime /var/lib/hwclock
   ln -s /var/lib/hwclock/adjtime /etc/adjtime
   # the following two steps are only necessary if you use dhcp:
   mv /etc/resolv.conf /var/lib/misc/
   ln -s /var/lib/misc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf
   # Now mount root filesystem read-only and reboot
   mount -o remount,ro /
   reboot
   

The JFS filesystem is no longer supported for new installations. The kernel file system driver is still there, but YaST does not offer partitioning with JFS.

For the future strategy and development with respect to volume- and storage-management on SUSE Linux Enterprise System, please see: http://www.novell.com/linux/volumemanagement/strategy.html

The ippl package is deprecated and will be removed with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.

powertweak package is deprecated and will be removed with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.

CTC, ESCON, and IUCV IP interfaces are no longer officially supported. For compatibility reasons, they are still usable, but with the next release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the support of these interfaces will be dropped completely.

For reasons of compatibility with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, the mapped-base functionality is present in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. This functionality is used by 32-Bit applications that need a larger dynamic data space (such as database management systems).

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, a similar functionality called flexmap is available. Because this is now the preferred way, mapped-base is deprecated and will vanish in future releases.

Individual Timeout Value for Each Direct AutoFS Mount

If there were two direct mounts with different timeouts configured, the second one was ignored and the first timeout value was used for both mount points.

AutoFS was patched to support individual timeout values for each direct mount.

Boot Device Larger Than 2 TiB

Due to limitations in the legacy x86/x86_64 BIOS implementations booting from devices larger than 2 TiB is technically not possible using legacy partition tables (DOS MBR).

To boot such systems, configure a separate boot partition with the YaST partitioner.

EVMS and /boot partition

In some cases it can happen, that the /boot partition in an EVMS setup is no longer mountable after an update. In this case please specify evms=partition as kernel boot option.

Known issue with the 8Gb/s LPe1200x HBAs and firmware version 2.00a3.

It has been found that possible issues may be encountered when the SLES10-SP4 distribution kernel is used with the in-box LPFC driver, on a system with 8Gb/s LPe1200x HBAs and firmware version 2.00a3. These issues could be encountered during fabric faults with multipathing, and visible symptoms include loss of LUNs and/or FC host hang.

If these issues are encountered it is recommended to do one of the following:

You can accomplish this by doing either of the following:

For additional information on how to set the LPFC driver module parameters, refer to the Emulex Drivers for Linux User Manual.

Booting on machines with more than 480 GB RAM

64bit Machines with more than 480 GB RAM may refuse to boot with the following error message:

(XEN)  ****************************************
(XEN)  Panic on CPU 0:
(XEN)  Not enough RAM for DOM0 reservation.
(XEN)  ****************************************
    

To avoid this error, it is recommended to always specify the Domain 0 Memory size with the boot parameter dom0_mem=VALUE on machine equipped with large amounts of RAM. Set the VALUE at or below the boundary of 480 GB—the difference is reserved for the hypervisor (to be used for guest VMs).

Permanently add this parameter to your boot loader configuration by adding the parameter dom0_mem=VALUE to your Xen kernel boot configuration. Either use YaST > System > Boot Loader or edit /boot/grub/menu.lst. See Section 2.3, “Managing Domain 0 Memory” (page 11) for more information.

Direct Device Assingment in XEN in a System with a PCIe switch.

Configuring Xen or KVM to do direct device assignment in a system that has a PCIe switch in the direct assignment path may result in unpredictable system behavior.

An I/O device directly assigned to a domain that uses guest physical addresses in upstream memory requests may conflict with the host physical memory addresses configured in the PCIe switch base address. When these I/O devices are connected through such a PCIe switch, the switch may mis-route these requests as peer-to-peer traffic. This could result in unpredictable system behavior, which may include incorrect data written into other unprotected devices or virtual machine.

Both systems and addin cards may contain a PCIe switch. Customers should check with their vendors to determine if a PCIe switch exists on their platforms or any of their add in cards. If there is such a switch on the platform, then the customer should not assign a PCIe device down stream from such a switch to a guest virtual machine.

As detailed in the following paragraph customers can use the output of the command `lspci' and `lspci -t' to see if there is a PCIe switch in their system and, if so, if any devices should not be directly assgned because they are downstream from that switch. Note that if the output of `lspci' does not show the presence of a PCIe switch then there is no danger in doing any direct assginment of PCI devices.

Consider the following synthetic example where the output of `lspci' contains:

00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 12)
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82576 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 01)
0a:00.0 PCI bridge: PES4T4 PCI Express Switch
0d:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 01)
	

Since there is a switch (device 0a:00.0) on this system the output of `lspci -t' shows:

-[0000:00]-+-00.0
           +-01.0-[0000:01-02]--+-00.0
           |
           +-0a.0-[0000:0d-0e]--+-00.0
	

From this topology it can be seen that there are 2 PCIe devices that can potentially be directly assigned, 01:00.0 and 0d:00.0. Since the first device, 01:00.0, is down stream from a bridge it is safe to directly assign that device to a virtual machine. The second device, 0d:00.0, is down stream from a PCIe switch and should not be directly assigned.

Suspend Power Management Features

The suspend power management features (specifically hibernate and sleep/standby) are not supported on servers running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. These features may work on many systems, but cannot be guaranteed.

i586 and i686 Machine with more than 16 GB of Memory

Depending on the workload, i586 and i686 machines with 16GB-48GB of memory can run into instabilities. Machines with more than 48GB of memory are not supported at all. To run on such a machine, lower the memory with the mem= kernel boot option.

On such memory scenarios we strongly recommend to use a x86-64 with 64-bit SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and run the x86 applications on it.

Bootloader and mount by UUID or LABEL

When the way the root device is mounted (by UUID or by label) is changed in YaST, the boot loader configuration needs to be saved again to make the change effective for the boot loader.

The "mount by" setting displayed in the YaST2 boot loader module is the setting that will be in effect after saving the configuration.

EVMS Volumes Might Not Appear When Using iSCSI

If you have installed and configured an iSCSI SAN and have created and configured EVMS Disks or Volumes on that iSCSI SAN, your EVMS volumes might not be visible or accessible. This problem is caused by EVMS starting before the iSCSI service. iSCSI must be started and running before any disks or volumes on the iSCSI SAN can be accessed.

To resolve this problem, enter either chkconfig evms on or chkconfig boot.evms on at the Linux server console of every server that is part of your iSCSI SAN. This ensures that EVMS and iSCSI start in the proper order each time your servers reboot.

Reset behavior of MAC addresses on POWER 6 eHEA Adapter

The reset behavior of the Power 6 eHEA (Host Ethernet Adapter) depends on the firmware level and the way the Linux system is restarted. The system can be restarted in one of the four ways:

The firmware behavior concerning MAC address resetting differs between the methods described above and between different firmware revisions. The relevant firmware version is encoded in the last 3 digits of the EC number shown in the update menu of the HMC.

Value of 330 or bigger: Mac addresses are reset to default values for all four restart methods

Value smaller than 330:

Setting up bonding on a POWER 6 eHEA Adapter

eHEA ethernet devices can be bound to a bonding device. When removing the bonding device it is important to detach all ehea ethernet devices from the bonding device before unloading the bonding module. Otherwise the unload operation will hang.

	modprobe bonding mode=active-backup miimon=10
	ifconfig bond0 A.B.C.D up
	ifenslave bond0 eth0 [where eth0 is an ehea]
	....systemstart finished...

	....shutdown started...
	ifenslave -d bond0 eth0   #<--- this is important
	rmmod bonding
   

cpio and files larger 4GB

cpio is not able to add files larger than 4GB to an archive.

KDE and IPv6 Support

By default, IPv6 support is not enabled for KDE. You can enable it using the /etc/sysconfig editor of YaST. This feature is disabled because IPv6 addresses are not properly supported by all Internet service providers and, as a consequence, would lead to error messages while browsing the Web and delays while displaying Web pages.

Installing/Updating on IBM System z9

When installing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on a System z9, some restrictions apply through hardware or software. Some of these restrictions are part of these Release Notes. For an updated list, refer to http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/linux390/october2005_restrictions.html.

For IBM System z9 machines ensure to have MCF RJ9967101E or IBM System z9 GA3 base driver installed. Otherwise Linux reboot will not work.

Using Disks in z/VM (System z)

If SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 is installed on disks in z/VM, which reside on the same physical disk, the created access path (/dev/disk/by-id/) is not unique. The ID of a disk is the ID of the underlying disk. So if two or more disk are on the same physical disk, they all have the same ID.

To avoid this ambiguity, please use the access path by-path. This can be specified during the installation when the mount points are defined.

The above restriction does not apply for SLES10 SP2 (which has a fix for Problem-ID 34345 and 43704), if you have the z/VM PTF for APAR VM64273, with which z/VM provides a unique identifier that allows to distinguish between virtual disks on the same real device. Udev rules that provide both old and new /dev/disk/by-id paths are included. To use the new IDs in your multipath setup, please replace the getuid_callout "/sbin/dasdinfo -u -b %n" with "/sbin/dasdinfo -x -b %n" in your multipath configuration for DASD devices. Please see the man page for the dasdinfo tool for additional information.

Local Mounts of iSCSI Shares

An iSCSI shared device should never be mounted directly on the local machine. In an OCFS2 environment, doing so causes all hardware to hard hang.

Restriction When Using cpint/hcp (System z)

When using the cpint/hcp interface with z/VM 5.1 or earlier, the guest should not have more than 2 GByte of storage. If the guest has more storage, the command may fail.

YaST2 CD-Creator and YUM installation sources

The YaST2 CD-Creator module does not support YUM installation sources like our update server provides. For this reason, it is not possible to create a medium with updates included. If you want to create a medium with updates included, use YaST2 Product-Creator.

YaST2 Product-Creator is a successor of YaST2 CD-Creator. It includes a GUI for the kiwi imaging system. This way it is also possible to create a Live-CD, XEN image, etc. from the same configuration used in the CD Creator. The Product-Creator will get shipped together with the SDK.

Be aware that selecting all patterns will cause the VMI kernel to be installed and set as the default boot kernel. VMI is intended only for VMware guests and is not guaranteed to boot on bare metal.

If you do not intend to install the VMI kernel, deselect the package by choosing "Details", then search for VMI package and clear the installation checkbox.

Firmware for Brocade FC adapter

If a Brocade FC adapter is installed after the installation of the OS, please make sure to install the firmware via YaST Software Management (package brocade-firmware) in addition. Otherwise the driver will fail to support the new device.

Issues when trying to install with 128GB of physical memory

During the installation on the x86_64 platform you may encounter the following error message when the system has 128 Gigabytes (GB) of physical memory installed:

CI-Direct Memory Access (DMA): Using software bounce buffering for I/O (SWIOTLB) low bootmem alloc of 67108864 bytes failed! Kernel panic - not syscing: Out of low memory.

This can be solved by adding the parameter "swiotlb=512" to "Boot Options" at the beginning of the installation screen.

Bugfixes

This Service Pack contains all the latest bugfixes for each package released via the maintenance Web since the GA version.

Security Fixes

This Service Pack contains all the latest security fixes for each package released via the maintenance Web since the GA version.

Program Temporary Fixes

This Service Pack contains all the PTFs (Program Temporary Fix) for each package released via the maintenance Web since the GA version which were suitable for integration into the maintained common codebase.

OCFS2 options needed for SAP

As part of our collaboration with SAP, we have worked intensively on improving the performance of our ocfs2 cluster filesystem to meet the high demands in the SAP BIA/BWA environment. Some improvements (like the better handling of huge numbers of locks) benefit all customers automatically, while some others need specific mkfs and mount options. These will be shortly described here. There are a few specific tradeoffs to be made:

Locale Settings in ~/.i18n

If you are not satisfied with locale system defaults, change the settings in ~/.i18n. Entries in ~/.i18n override system defaults from /etc/sysconfig/language. Use the same variable names but without the RC_ namespace prefixes, for example, use LANG instead of RC_LANG. For information about locales in general, see "Language and Country-Specific Settings" in the Reference Manual.

Configuration of kdump

The kernel is crashing or otherwise misbehaving and a kernel core dump needs to be captured for analysis.

A description on how to setup kdump can be found under the following URL: http://www.novell.com/support/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=3374462&sliceId=SAL_Public

Realtime Applications

When running real-time applications on larger systems, lower maximum latencies can be achieved by employing the new disable_buffer_lru kernel command-line option. This disables the per-CPU LRU in the buffer cache, and may thus decrease overall filesystem performance.

JPackage Standard for Java Packages

Java packages are changed to follow the JPackage Standard (http://www.jpackage.org/). Read the documentation in /usr/share/doc/packages/jpackage-utils/ for information.

Loading unsupported kernel drivers

To load unsupported kernel drivers automatically during boot, set the sysconfig variable LOAD_UNSUPPORTED_MODULES_AUTOMATICALLY in /etc/sysconfig/hardware/config to "yes".

Nonexecutable Stack

Already introduced for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on the x86-64 (AMD64) architecture with 64-bit kernels, the Linux kernel in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also supports nonexecutable stack (NX) on x86 for CPUs that support it (Intel Prescott and AMD64) with 32-bit kernels. For this to work, the kernel with PAE support, kernel-bigsmp, must be installed. Go into YaST and install that kernel instead of your default kernel. For 64-bit kernels, all kernels support NX.

The nonexecutable stack improves the security of your system. Many security vulnerabilities are stack overflows, where an attacker overwrites the stack of your program by feeding oversized data to the application that fails to properly check the length. Depending on the details of the program, with nonexecutable stack, these vulnerabilities may either not be exploitable (and only crash the program, resulting in a DoS) or at least be significantly harder to exploit.

Some applications do require executable stacks. The compiler detects this during compilation and marks the binaries accordingly. The kernel enable an executable stack for them to allow them to work.

On x86-64, to provide a higher level of security, the user can pass noexec=on on the kernel command line. The kernel then uses a nonexecutable stack unconditionally and also marks the data section of a program nonexecutable. This provides a higher protection level than just the nonexecutable stack, but potentially causes problems for some applications. Novell has not found any problems during testing the most commonly used applications and services. Because it is not the default, this has not been tested as extensively as the stack protection alone, so Novell only recommends this setup for servers after the administrator has verified that all needed services continue to function properly.

Start server with plain vga and displayed messages

In some cases, the usage of a special vga mode parameter (e.g. "vga=0x317") might slow down the boot process of a SLES server. The boot process can be quickened by setting the kernel parameter "vga=normal" in /boot/grub/menu.lst instead of using a special vga mode.

Moreover, to be able to see an occurring kernel oops or similar on the console, it's useful to remove the kernel parameter "splash=silent" from the respective entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Read the READMEs on the DVDs.

Get the detailed changelog information about a particular package from the RPM (with filename <FILENAME>):

rpm --changelog -qp <FILENAME>.rpm
    

Check the ChangeLog file in the top level of DVD1 for a chronological log of all changes made to the updated packages.

Find more information in the docu directory of DVD1 of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 DVDs. This directory includes PDF versions of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 startup and preparation guides.

http://www.suse.com/documentation/sles10/ contains additional or updated documentation for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

These Release Notes are identical across all architectures. The latest version is available online at http://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/10-SP4/, http://www.suse.com/releasenotes/s390x/SUSE-SLES/10-SP4/, etc.

Visit http://www.suse.com for the latest Linux product news from SUSE and http://www.suse.com/download-linux/source-code.html for additional information on the source code of SUSE Linux Enterprise products.