April 3, 2017

RHEL 5 end of service

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Red Hat announced the end of service for RHEL 5. They will offer another three and a half years of security patches and critical fixes if a customer has bought the Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS).

This enterprise distribution has been in the market now for more than ten years. Now it's time to move on. Best of course would be the RHEL 7 stream, which right now is at RHEL 7.3. Every day you stay on the old release without security updates is increasing the risk of being hacked!

February 22, 2017

SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 2 (SLES 12 SP2) released

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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):
Here is my usual summary of links to more information:
(updated 5/2/2017)

February 16, 2017

IBM z Systems Processor Optimization Primer

For z Systems optimizations are essential to keep the consolidation ratio high and make the best use of the hardware. As more and more open source software is ported to Linux on z / LinuxONE Kevin Shum has posted his excellent "BM z Systems Processor Optimization Primer" on developerworks.

There is a long version with all the details and a shorter summary presented at last SHARE.

This is a "must read" for everyone working on compilers and inline assembly on z.