openSUSE moving baseline CPU requirements
The future direction of openSUSE distros is firming up and has ramifications for its business-focused offspring SLE and Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP).
It's not all that often that specific sub-versions of the x86-64 spec come up, but you can expect it to happen a lot more often as the 64-bit x86 platform reaches 20 years old next year. So far, there are four revisions of the x86-64 spec, appropriately enough just called v1, v2 (2008-2011), v3 (2013-2017) and v4. More will doubtless emerge in the future.
Back in July we covered the debate about CPU requirements for SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). For a rundown of the differences between the revisions, refer back to that article.
Around the middle of the year, SUSE was mulling making version 3 of the x86-64 instruction set a requirement, which would cut out a lot of relatively recent kit that was well under a decade old. That isn't going to happen, at least for now. There was some controversy over this quite high requirement, so it's been taken down a level. Instead, SUSE's next-gen enterprise distro, the MicroOS-based Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP for short) will mandate x86-64-v2, the same baseline required by Red Hat's RHEL 9.