Good news everyone! SLE 15 SP4 is now released

The SLE engineering team is excited to announce that SLE 15 SP4 is now available for download!

We have been working hard to make this release as boring smooth as possible for our users, despite updating at least 23% of our entire code and syncing selected packages from openSUSE Factory. Countless internal person-hours were required for developing, testing, releasing, documenting this new Refresh Service Pack and yet we also have to thank our Public Beta testers, our Technology Partners and of course our openSUSE community for their priceless contribution! Releasing our SUSE Linux Enterprise product Family is a truly collective effort, so thank you all!

Notable Changes

General

• GNOME 41.x Our default desktop environment has been updated to the latest available stable upstream release. Note that to make that possible, we have synced many packages (like GTK 4.0) with openSUSE Factory.
• Linux Kernel 5.14: SLE 15 SP4 includes the Linux 5.14 kernel. Also, as usual, we are backporting a large number of patches to our 5.14 kernel, which makes our kernel different from the upstream 5.14 version.
• SLES Base Containers Images (SLE BCI) More images will be available through registry.suse.com
• Our Just enough Operating System (JeOS) virtual machine images have been renamed Minimal-VM
• Removed and deprecated features Python 2, pam/nss ldap, openldap2-server is removed from SLE 15 SP4. And we would like to emphasise, that we have deprecate some features in SLE 15 SP4. These will be removed with the next Service Pack.
• With NVIDIA’s recent release of its open sourced GPU kernel-mode driver, SLE 15 SP4 is the first major Linux distribution to deliver it, streamlining GPU-accelerated
• The migration from SLE 11 to SLE 15 SP4 is not supported

Security

• Adding SLSA 4 compliance to existing security certifications: SLE 15 SP4 is the first Linux distribution to deliver packages under the demanding Google SLSA standard distinctly, adding a SLSA Level 4 Compliant Supply Chain. This helps to protect against the increasing software security and supply chain threats customers face today.
• AMD SEV-ES (Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Encrypted State) host and guest modes, SLE 15 SP4 is the first Linux distribution to support AMD SEV-ES, enabling customers to select additional security-strengthening VM isolation.
• Userland Live Patching, our SLE Live Patching product now includes the user space patching capability.
• Adding openSSL 3.0.1
• Update to systemd v249 and adding LUKS2 support in yast2 to support unlocking LUKS2 partitions with TPM2 and FIDO2.

Languages and Databases

• Adding PHP 8 and OpenJDK 17
• Python:
  • New Python 3 Module, including Python 3.10. This new module will require special handling in case of migration from SLE 15 SP3. Please refer to the entry in the Release Notes.
  • Removal of Python 2 Module (thus all Python 2 packages) for SLE 15SP4. Please refer to the entry in the Release Notes.
• MariaDB 10.6, which is the current long-term support MariaDB stable release.
• PostgreSQL 14 is now the default PostgreSQL version on SLE 15 SP4. PostgreSQL 13 has been moved to the Legacy Module for migration purposes

And more

• 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
• openSUSE Leap 15.4 was also released!
• SLES and SLES for SAP 15 SP4 and SUSE Manager 4.3 are available on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform
  • A new general guide for SUSE Linux Enterprise in Public Clouds

Release Notes and Press Release

As always, we highly recommend to check our Release Notes for a complete overview of the changes:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP 15 SP4
• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability 15 SP4
• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Perfomance Computing 15 SP4
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 SP4

Last but not least, please check out our Press Release announcement for SLE 15 SP4!