SLES 11 SP3 released

Today SUSE announced the release of Service Pack 3 for SLES 11. It's been more than 16 months since the last release, so quite some waiting time for new features. This time the kernel level stayed the same, so the upgrade from SLES11 SP2 to SLES11 SP3 should be easier than the one before.  You can find more information on this release here:

• press release
• overview and list of new features for the mainframe
• release notes (s390x version) 
• release notes for High Availability Extensions (System z / s390x version) 
• release notes for SDK (System z / s390x version)
• kernel level: 3.0.76-0.9.1
• SUSE FAQ for SLES 11 SP3
• updated packages
• Here are some interesting features with links to the respective release notes entry:
• Transactional Execution Facility support
• libhugetlbfs support for transparent usage of large pages
• Optimized zlib compression library (see also my separate blog post) and upgrade to zlib 1.2.7
• Linux perf tool with hardware counters for performance analysis
• gcc 4.7 on SDK with zEC12 instructions and optimizations
• Crypto Express 4 (CEX4) support
• SHA-256 support in CCA token
• Flash Express support
• Fuzzy live dump
• kdump for Linux on System z
• and many more 
• Documentation
• SUSE page updated to SP3 level
• documentation as large zip file  (updated to SP3 level)
• IBM documentation on developerworks
• SUSE tuning guide updated to SP3 
• Oracle Database (10gR2 & 11gR2) on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3

SUSE has released the first maintenance web kernel for SP3 (kernel-default-3.0.82-0.7.9.s390x.rpm). It contains more fixes than usual so as always when upgrading and starting, get the latest service installed. 

As more information becomes available I'll update this post. Latest Update 8/6/2013.