Developers of the Opensuse atomarly updated distribution Opensuse Leap Micro 5.5, designed for microservices and virtualization platforms. The updated distribution is available for download for architectures x86_64 and ARM64 (AARCH64). It is supplied as an installer (offline collection, size 2.1 GB) or as ready-made loading images ranging from 782 MB to 1.1 GB. These images can be run on XEN and KVM hypervisors or on equipment like Raspberry Pi.
Opensuse Leap Micro is based on the achievements of the microos project and is positioned as a commercial product of SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro. It differs from the Linux Enterprise Micro by not having a graphical interface supply. To configure it, users can use the Web-interface Cockpit, cloud-init tools, or combustion for setting settings during the first load. The user can switch from Leap Micro to SUSE SLE Micro, allowing for a free solution based on Leap Micro, and later transferring the configuration to SUSE SLE Micro if extended support or certification is needed.
The key feature of Leap Micro is the mechanism of atomic installation of updates, which load and use updates automatically. In contrast to Fedora and Ubuntu, OpenSuse LEAP Micro uses full-time packet management tools (Transactional-Updates) combined with the mechanism of Snapshots in FS BTRFS for atomic switching between system states before and after installing updates. If any issues arise after applying updates, the system can be rolled back to the previous state. Live patching allows users to update the Linux nucleus without restarting or suspending work.
Container support is integrated into Leap Micro with support for Runtime Podman/CRI-O and Docker to launch isolated containers. Micro editing of the distribution is used in the ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform) project to ensure the operation of the Host OS environment. ALP proposes the use of a cut “Host OS” on top of equipment, with user applications and components running in separate containers or virtual machines, isolated from each other.