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Thisdocument provides guidance and an overview to high level general features and updates for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12. Besides architecture or product-specific information, it also describes the capabilities and limitations of SLES 12. General documentation may be found at: -12/.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a highly reliable, scalable, and secure server operating system, built to power mission-critical workloads in both physical and virtual environments. It is an affordable, interoperable, and manageable open source foundation. With it, enterprises can cost-effectively deliver core business services, enable secure networks, and simplify the management of their heterogeneous IT infrastructure, maximizing efficiency and value.

The only enterprise Linux recommended by Microsoft and SAP, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is optimized to deliver high-performance mission-critical services, as well as edge of network, and web infrastructure workloads.

Designed for interoperability, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server integrates into classical Unix as well as Windows environments, supports open standard interfaces for systems management, and has been certified for IPv6 compatibility.

This modular, general purpose operating system runs on three processor architectures and is available with optional extensions that provide advanced capabilities for tasks such as real time computing and high availability clustering.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is optimized to run as a high performing guest on leading hypervisors and supports an unlimited number of virtual machines per physical system with a single subscription, making it the perfect guest operating system for virtual computing.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 has a 13 years life cycle, with 10 years of General Support and 3 years of Extended Support. The current version (GA) will be fully maintained and supported until 6 months after the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP1. If you need additional time to design, validate and test your upgrade plans, Long Term Service Pack Support can extend the support you get an additional 12 to 36 months in twelve month increments, giving you a total of 3 to 5 years of support on any given service pack.

Robustness on administrative errors and improved management capabilities with full system rollback based on btrfs as the default file system for the operating system partition and SUSE's snapper technology.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Modules offer a choice of supplemental packages, ranging from tools for Web Development and Scripting, through a Cloud Management module, all the way to a sneak preview of SUSE's upcoming management tooling called Advanced Systems Management. Modules are part of your SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription, are technically delivered as online repositories, and differ from the base of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server only by their lifecycle.

GNOME 3.10 (or just GNOME 3), giving users a modern desktop environment with a choice of several different look and feel options, including a special SUSE Linux Enterprise Classic mode for easier migration from earlier SUSE Linux Enterprise desktop environments

For users wishing to use the full range of productivity applications of a Desktop with their SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we are now offering the SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension (needs a SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop subscription).

Find more information in the docu directory of the media of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 . This directory includes PDF versions of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Installation Quick Start and Deployment Guides. Documentation (if installed) is available below the /usr/share/doc/ directory of an installed system.

These Release Notes are identical across all architectures, and the most recent version is always available online at Some entries are listed twice, if they are important and belong to more than one section.

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 -linux/source-code.html. Also, for up to three years after distribution of the SUSE product, upon request, SUSE will mail a copy of the source code. Requests should be sent by e-mail to mailto:sle_sourc...@suse.com or as otherwise instructed at -linux/source-code.html. SUSE may charge a reasonable fee to recover distribution costs.

Problem determination, which means technical support designed to provide compatibility information, usage support, on-going maintenance, information gathering and basic troubleshooting using available documentation.

Problem isolation, which means technical support designed to analyze data, duplicate customer problems, isolate problem area and provide resolution for problems not resolved by Level 1 or alternatively prepare for Level 3.

To retain compatibility with existing (MySQL based) deployments and dependencies, MariaDB is using the name libmysql.so for shared libraries. Thus, according to the SUSE and openSUSE Shared Library Policy the RPMs for the MariaDB shared libraries are called libmysql.

Technology previews are packages, stacks, or features delivered by SUSE. These features are not supported. They may be functionally incomplete, unstable or in other ways not suitable for production use. They are mainly included for customer convenience and give customers a chance to test new technologies within an enterprise environment.

Whether a technical preview will be moved to a fully supported package later, depends on customer and market feedback. A technical preview does not automatically result in support at a later point in time. Technical previews could be dropped at any time and SUSE is not committed to provide a technical preview later in the product cycle.

sle2docker is a convenience tool which creates SUSE Linux Enterprise images for Docker. The tool relies on KIWI and Docker itself to build the images. Packages can be fetched either from SUSE Customer Center (SCC) or from a local Subscription Management Tool (SMT).

If your specific machine is not listed, call SUSE support to confirm whether or not your machine has been successfully tested. Also, regularly check our maintenance update information, which will explicitly mention the general availability of this feature.

VMCS Shadowing is a new VT-x feature that allows software in VMX non-root operation to execute the VMREAD and VMWRITE instructions. Such executions do not read from the current VMCS (the one supporting VMX non-root operation) but instead from a shadow VMCS. This feature will help improve nested virtualization performance. VMCS shadowing is provided as technology preview.

The experimental QEMU TPM passthrough feature should not be used in environments where non-root access is grated to the host. To enable TPM passthrough, the following actions must be taken in addition to allocating the device in the guest domain xml:

The guest must pass tpm_tis.force=1 on the guest kernel command line. This may be done via the bootloader configuration, typically found in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg. Be aware that YaST autogenerates this configuration file. Thus better use the Kernel Parameter tab of the YaST Boot Loader dialog to append tpm_tis.force=1 to the kernel command line parameters, or edit /etc/default/grub and then run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg.

The host administrator must chmod o+w /sys/class/misc/tpm0/device/cancel. As this permits host-wide access to cancel TPM commands by unprivileged users, no unprivileged users must be permitted to access the host when it is put into this configuration. It is anticipated that future versions of libvirt will perform the privileged access of /sys/class/misc/tpm0/device/cancel on QEMU's behalf such that permitting world write access to /sys/class/misc/tpm0/device/cancel will not be necessary.

Usually, when a system's physical memory is exceeded, the system moves some memory onto reserved space on a hard drive, called "swap" space. This frees physical memory space for additional use. However, this process of "swapping" memory onto (and back from) a hard drive is much, much slower than direct memory access, so it can slow down the entire system.

Starting with SLES 12, you can enable the zswap driver using the boot parameter zswap.enabled=1. The zswap driver inserts itself between the system and the swap hard drive, and instead of writing memory to a hard drive, it compresses memory. This speeds up both writing to swap and reading from swap, which results in better overall system performance while using swap.

The effective compression ratio cannot exceed 50 percent, that is, it can at most store two uncompressed pages in one compressed page.If the workload's compression ratio exceeds 50% for all pages, zswap will not be able to save any memory.

Compressed memory still uses a certain amount of memory, so zswap has a limit to the amount of memory which will be stored compressed, which is controllable through the file /sys/module/zswap/parameters/max_pool_percent. By default, this is set to 20, which indicates zswap will use 20 percent of the total system physical memory to store compressed memory.

The zswap memory limit has to be carefully configured. Setting the limit too high can lead to premature out-of-memory situations that would not exist without zswap, if the memory is filled by non-swappable non-reclaimable pages. This includes mlocked memory and pages locked by drivers and other kernel users.

For the same reason, performance can also be hurt by compression/decompression if the current workload's workset would fit in, for example, 90 percent of the available RAM, but 20 percent of RAM is already occupied by zswap. This means that the missing 10 percent of uncompressed RAM would constantly be swapped out of/in to the memory area compressed by zswap, while the rest of the memory compressed by zswap would hold pages that were swapped out earlier which are currently unused. There is no mechanism that would result in gradual writeback of those unused pages to let the uncompressed memory grow.

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