SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 4 Public Beta is out!

We are thrilled to start our Public Beta Program for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 4 with the release of PublicBeta-20220.

The Public SLE 15SP4 webpage is now live! Please check it out for all the Public information.

Refresh Service Pack

SLE 15 SP4 is a “Refresh” Service Pack. And so, our Release Management team has provided guidance to our engineering for updating packages in SLE 15 SP4 to a new openSUSE Factory version. Still we are carefully evaluating and accepting package updates, while checking for the latest changes in the upstream project and verifying it is not breaking any ABI.

Notable Changes

• General
  • GNOME 41.x,
  • Linux Kernel 5.14,
  • More SLES Base Containers Images (SLE BCI) will be available through registry.suse.com,
  • Minimal-VM, our Just enough Operating System (JeOS) virtual machine images are now renamed Minimal-VM.
• Languages and Databases
  • Adding PHP 8 and OpenJDK 17,
  • New Python 3 Module, including Python 3.10,
  • Removal of Python 2 Module for SLE 15SP4,
  • MariaDB 10.6,
  • PostgreSQL 14 is now the default PostgreSQL version on SLE 15 SP4.
• And more
  • Userland Live Patching,
  • Adding support 64K page size in addition to 4K page size in KVM for ARM,
  • Adding support for Nvidia virtual GPU 12.x and 13.x,
  • Newer Apparmor 3.0.X,
  • Adding openSSL 3.0.1.

Important notice

Change to all packages version

We have been facing quite some downgrade issues, where SLE12 has higher release numbers than SLE15, and some intra-service pack problems. Largely they appear when doing package version bumps, which breaks the release number inheritance chain tracked in our Internal Build Service. Maintenance has been fixing these piece by piece via “link vrev” changes. In a combined effort we have decided to fix this in a more general way. Therefore all SLE 15 SP4 packages are going to include the “sle_version” as a prefix to their release number. This won’t affect the defined versioning of your packages.

The result will look something like this:

example-package: 3.4.2-1.1 => 3.4.2-150400.1.1

Note that this is affecting openSUSE Leap 15.4 as well. Find more information on the RPM Disto Version Macros like 150400 from here.

New Python 3 Module with Python 3.10

This new module will allow us more flexibility for the lifecycle of the packages provided within it and a clean separation between the system and development interpreter.
As python39 resided in the Basesystem Module on SLE 15 SP3, this new module will require some changes by customers and partners migrating to SLE 15 SP4. Customers using python39 and migrating from SLE 15 SP3 will have to add the Python3 module after migration via SUSEConnect. Else they won’t receive any updates for this interpreter.
We are going to provide a documentation and Release Notes entry with more details on this change.

Removal of Python 2 Module

Python 2 won’t be shipped with SLE 15 SP4 anymore but the removal of python 2 dependencies is still ongoing. There are a few parts left still relying on python and python-base. The plan is to remove those remaining python 2 packages and cleaning out the dependencies latest until our Release Candidate phase. As previously communicated in our past Release Notes, the Python 2 Module has been removed with SLE 15 SP4:

• https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/15-SP2/index.html#fate-327577
• https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/15-SP3/index.html#jsc-SLE-16746
• https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/15-SP4/index.html#jsc-SLE-16746

SLES 15 SP4 Beta BCI

We also have published SLES 15 SP4 Beta Base Container Images to our registry.suse.com. Note that they are not visible on the registry website but they are effectively available.

More information

Please visit https://www.suse.com/betaprogram/sle-beta for more information like beta schedule, how to report issues, how to start a discussion with SLE Engineering and more.

One more thing

We wish you an happy hacking and happy testing time and we wanted to share a bit of fun with you: new SUSE Music Parody: Personal Linux

Have fun beta testing!

Your SUSE Linux Enterprise Team