After a year of development, SUSE has recently announced the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP6. This distribution is based on platforms such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE LINUX ENTERPRISE Desktop, SUSE LINUXETERPRPR ISE High Performance Computing, and SUSE Linux Enterprise High AvailaBolyty EXTENSION. Users can download and use the distribution for free, but access to updates and corrections is limited to a 60-day test period. The release is available for architectures Aarch64, PPC64le, S390X, and X86_64.
SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP6 offers complete binary compatibility of packages with the Opensuse Leap 15.6 distribution. This high level of compatibility is achieved by using a set of binary packages shared between SUSE Linux Enterprise and OpenSUSE, as opposed to re-packaging source packets. This allows users to develop and test solutions using Opensuse before seamlessly transitioning to the commercial version of SUSE Linux Enterprise with full support, SLA, certification, long-term release updates, and extended means for mass implementation.
Basic changes in SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP6 include:
- The desktop environment has been updated to Gnome 45 (previous version had GNOME 41) and the graphical stack has been updated to Mesa 23.3.4.
- The Linux kernel has been updated to version 6.4 (previously used 5.14) with updated GLIBC 2.38 and Systemd 254. SystemD now defaults to CGROUP V2.
- Several components have been updated such as Dracut 059, Pulseaudio 17.0, Pipewire 1.0.4, DPDK 22.1, and more for virtualization and container isolation.
- An experimental feature, IAA (IAA Compression Accelerator), has been added to accelerate data compression and decryption using cryptographic accelerators.
- By default, the use of Docker Hub and Opensuse Registry containers are disabled. Users must specify them in /etc/Containers/registries.conf to download containers from these repositories.