Jump to content
Back to Release Notes for SUSE products / SL Micro Release Notes
SL Micro Release Notes 6.1

SL Micro Release Notes

 
Publication Date: 2024-03-26, Version: 6.1.20241125

SL Micro is a modern operating system primarily targeted for edge computing. This document provides a high-level overview of its features, capabilities, and limitations.

1 About the release notes

 

These Release Notes are identical across all architectures, and the most recent version is always available online at https://www.suse.com/releasenotes.

Entries are only listed once but they can be referenced in several places if they are important and belong to more than one section.

Release notes usually only list changes that happened between two subsequent releases. Certain important entries from the release notes of previous product versions are repeated. To make these entries easier to identify, they contain a note to that effect.

However, repeated entries are provided as a courtesy only. Therefore, if you are skipping one or more service packs, check the release notes of the skipped service packs as well. If you are only reading the release notes of the current release, you could miss important changes.

1.1 Documentation and other information

 

1.1.1 Available on the product media

 

  • Read the READMEs on the media.

  • Get the detailed change log information about a particular package from the RPM (where FILENAME.rpm is the name of the RPM):

    rpm --changelog -qp FILENAME.rpm

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

  • Find more information in the docu directory of the installation medium of SL Micro. This directory includes PDF versions of the SL Micro Installation Quick Start Guide.

  • Get list of manual pages with usage information about a particular package from the RPM (where FILENAME.rpm is the name of the RPM):

    rpm --docfiles -qp FILENAME.rpm | grep man

1.1.2 Online documentation

 

For the most up-to-date version of the documentation for SL Micro, see:

2 SL Micro Version 6.1

 

These release notes apply to SL Micro 6.1.

2.1 Changes affecting all architectures

 

2.1.1 Installation media

 

On top of the images described above with SL Micro 6.1 we are adding PXE boot images (network boot .tar) for all architectures except ppc64le.

2.1.2 Supported Architectures

 

SL Micro 6.1 adds general support for the IBM Power platform (ppc64le) to the product. It requires at least IBM Power9. IBM Power8 is not supported.

2.1.3 Upgrade Path

 

An online migration of existing SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 5.5 or SL Micro 6.0 installations to SL Micro 6.1 is possible and is fully supported.

2.1.4 Release numbering change

 

In SL Micro 6.1, the package release numbers start with slfo.1.1, while there was no such prefix in SL Micro 6.0. Due to this, the release numbers of SL Micro 6.1 are lower than the ones on SL Micro 6.0 (as the above translates to 0.1.1). This is a known issue and will not happen in future releases. The standard migration tooling will handle this correctly.

2.1.5 Password-based remote root login not allowed

 

For enhanced security, new installations of SL Micro 6.1 do not allow password-based remote root login anymore, which also affects Cockpit. The login to Cockpit now requires to create and use an unprivileged user and to optionally set up 2-factor authentication with one-time passwords. The firstboot-installer as well as ignition and the online tool fuel-ignition support this setup.

For more information about the procedure and other options see https://documentation.suse.com/en-us/sle-micro/6.1/html/Micro-6.1-cockpit/index.html#cockpit-authentication-basics.

2.1.6 Soft-Reboot support

 

Ability to activate SW changes without the need to reboot. Support for soft-reboot is fully integrated in transactional-update and rebootmgr. It only reboots the userland, not the hardware or kernel. This reduces the downtime of SL Micro dramatically, if the changes don’t contain an updated kernel or bootloader, as you don’t have to go through the full boot cycle to enable the new root subvolume. The behavior of reboot depends on the configuration and changes performed to the system. If soft-reboot is enabled, only the user space may be restarted without rebooting the hardware and kernel. To enable and configure soft-reboot functionality please refer to the documentation.

2.1.7 RAM Compressor (Z-RAM)

 

ZRAM allows users to both compress main memory and therefore gain more compute resources on smaller systems, but also allows users to use a compressed area of main memory as a swap device, with the added option to back that by a block device. That allows the system to support more complex setups with limited resources available. Key benefits of zram are fast I/O operations and memory savings.

2.1.8 Active Directory

 

SL Micro supports integration with Active Directory environments based on sssd since SL Micro 6.0.

2.1.9 Build Host and Build Date Metadata

 

The RPM packages that SL Micro uses are built with reproducible builds in mind. This is also reflected in the package metadata. For example, Build Host is now unified, and the package’s Build Date corresponds to the latest change in the package sources. In contrast, regular packages’s Build Date refers to the date when the package was built instead.

2.2 Removed and deprecated features and packages

 

This section lists features and packages that were removed from SL Micro or will be removed in upcoming versions.

2.2.1 Removed features and packages

 

  • busybox

  • salt-master

  • k3s

3 Obtaining source code

 

This SUSE product includes materials licensed to SUSE under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL requires SUSE to provide the source code that corresponds to the GPL-licensed material. The source code is available for download at https://www.suse.com/download/sle-micro/ on Medium 2. For up to three years after distribution of the SUSE product, upon request, SUSE will mail a copy of the source code. Send requests by e-mail to sle_source_request@suse.com. SUSE may charge a reasonable fee to recover distribution costs.