First 64-Bit and Enterprise OS Comes to Raspberry Pi 3

Hi,

First 64-Bit and Enterprise OS Comes to Raspberry Pi 3

SUSE supports a lot of architectures and runs on everything from IBM mainframe to x86 machines, and more. With ARM’s push in the data center, it made even more sense for SUSE to work closely with ARM to support yet another platform. When the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B was announced, SUSE engineers found that it runs on the Broadcom BCM2837 64-bit A53 ARM processor. A lot of work has already been completed on this processor for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, so getting SLES or openSUSE to run on Raspberry Pi 3 Model B was only a matter of time. During SUSECon 2016, SUSE announced SLES support for Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. Due to a close and somewhat complicated relationship (openSUSE is based on source code of SLES, whereas openSUSE is touted as the upstream of SLES) between SLES and openSUSE, the announcement also means that openSUSE will also be able to run on the same device. I have installed and used all three distributions (SLES, openSUSE Leap, and openSUSE Tumbleweed) on Raspberry Pi, and I am pretty impressed with their performance. They all run flawlessly. You can download openSUSE Leap, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and SLES from the following links. The good news is that SUSE is also offering a self-service subscription for SLES for a year.

Seems like at least one professional distribution is using the Raspberry Pi. That's good news and will hopefully help the spread of the Pi even more. I only use one at work (with a full-time job and three kids there's not too much spare time) but the little thing is quite impressive (with Raspbian).

Novell will have some struggle here, though. According to this answer on stackexchange, there are cons to running 64-bit on a Pi. And handshaking (as mentioned as a pro in the original poster's link) is not exactly done all the time, except on a production server, is it? So any performance increase may not be noticable for the (mainly fun) Pi users. - I'll definitely check back on that project to see how openSUSE 64 on the Pi is doing.

I was a bit surprised to read about good performance in the original poster's link. Performance is one reason I moved away from SuSE/openSUSE. (Just imagine how long the yast software install part (A script!) takes to start up when you have 5 online repositories and are on a Pentium 4 with 1 GB RAM!)

Would be interesting if a commercial server version of the Pi would be useful in server rooms. Can't say just yet.