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November 22, 2016

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server For Raspberry Pi

Suse Linux Enterprise Server For Raspberry Pi

The official Raspberry Pi Foundation has this week unveiled the news that SUSE have released a version of their Linux Enterprise Server product that supports Raspberry Pi 3.

The new Raspberry Pi 3 supported image of SUSE is now available to download directly from the official SUSE website by following the link below.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation explained a little more about what you can expect from this new SUSE image which has been created specifically for their latest and most powerful Raspberry Pi 3 mini PC.

Raspberry Pi 3, with its quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor, is our first 64-bit product, supporting ARM’s A64 instruction set and the ARMv8-A architecture. However, we’ve not yet taken the opportunity to ship a 64-bit operating system: our Raspbian images are designed to run on every Raspberry Pi, including the 32-bit ARMv6 Raspberry Pi 1 and Raspberry Pi Zero, and the 32-bit ARMv7 Raspberry Pi 2. We use an ARMv6 userland with selected ARMv7 fast paths enabled at run time.

There’s been some great work done in the community. Thanks to some heroic work from forum user Electron752, we have a working 64-bit kernel, and both Ubuntu and Fedora userlands have been run successfully on top of this. Which brings us to last week’s announcement: that SUSE have released a version of their Linux Enterprise Server product that supports Raspberry Pi 3.

The SUSE Blog writes

Yes, we actually took the enterprise grade, 64-bit, Linux operating system that is used around the world to support mission critical workloads in financial institutions, air traffic control centers, manufacturing centers, and high performance computing centers – and put it on a $35 credit card-sized computer.

There are several reasons why we did this. First, it was a matter of serendipity.  We noticed that the processor on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B was a Broadcom BCM2837 64-bit A53 ARM processor. So theoretically, much of the work needed to enable this processor in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) had already been done as part of the SLES for ARM project. Second, since over 10 million Raspberry Pi units have shipped, we saw an opportunity to introduce SLES to a lot of people who did not already have experience with SUSE Linux. Third, we thought that it would be really a cool way for our field team to demonstrate SLES at trade shows. And finally, we did it because it looked like a lot of fun!

For more information on the new SUSE image for the Raspberry Pi 3 mini PC jump over to the official SUSE website for details by following the link below.

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