SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 Released - Switches To NVIDIA's Open Kernel Driver, Adds AMD SEV-ES

In kicking off SUSECON, SUSE has announced the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 4. Notable with SLE 15 SP4, SUSE is already switching to using NVIDIA's open-source GPU kernel-mode driver that NVIDIA open-sourced last month and is under active development and has a long road ahead before it's even feasible for upstreaming into the mainline kernel.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 delivers on Google SLSA 4 supply chain compliance, adds support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization Encrypted State (SEV-ES), switches to using the open-source NVIDIA GPU kernel driver, and introduces Trento as a new SLES feature for SAP Applications.

SUSE's basis for using the open-source NVIDIA GPU kernel driver is for focusing on "the cloud-native world" and "SLE 15 SP4 is the first major Linux distribution to deliver it." The NVIDIA open GPU kernel driver is already considered production-ready for data-center GPUs with the R515 proprietary user-space driver components while it's for the consumer GeForce GPUs where it's not yet deemed production ready.

Having SLES 15 SP4 ready to support AMD SEV-ES is also great albeit unfortunate it didn't happen sooner. SEV-ES was introduced with prior AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors while already with AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors since last year is the latest SEV iteration in the form of SEV-SNP "Secure Nested Paging" with additional security benefits. Finally with Linux 5.19 there is mainline support for SEV-SNP while AMD has published SEV-SNP patches in an external tree since last March's Milan launch. Hopefully moving forward AMD will be better prepared with timely SEV patches (and other new feature enablement) so that it can work its way out to enterprise Linux distributions in a more timely manner.

SUSECON Digital 2022 is running through Thursday. More details on SUSE.com.