On November 8th 2016 eleven months after the last service pack SUSE has released the latest updated to their flag ship server distribution. SUSE also has a blog post with some more details.
The kernel level for 12.2 is kernel-4.4.21-69.1. This is a jump in the kernel version from the old 3.12 based kernel. It's the same major kernel level that's being used by Canonical for Ubuntu 16.04. And with that kernel a lot of new functionality is delivered. SUSE and IBM worked hard to ensure that for applications it behaves the same.
What's new (details see documentation and release notes):
- The release notes states that SUSE now fully supports MariaDB. They have version 10.0.27 inlcuded
- Networking:
- For OSA the specification of a portname is no longer needed
- Hipersockets can now be bridged to Erhernet
- Layer2 offloads are enabled
- The 10 GbE RoCE card now also supports the DAPL/OFED stack on
- Encryption and security updates
- Glibc has now the first set of SIMD exploitations for z13
- Toolchain module updates
- Full KVM host support - so you can now run SLES12 as a Hypervisor on System z an Linux boxes
- ....
- Complete SLES 12 documentation
- SLES 12.2 release notes (s390x version)
- z Systems / s390x specific information
- release notes for High Availability Extensions (z Systems / s390x version)
- release notes for SDK (z Systems / s390x version)
- SUSE tuning guide updated to SP2
- Whitepaper on SUSE's module concept
- IBM documentation on developerworks
- Docker support statement