Hacker News Reader

Comment by singingfish | Hacker News Reader

the SAP team at my old workplace had a bunch of SUSE merch sitting around. Suspect this might be a data point.

A couple of years ago (last time I worked with it) the SAP developer server images for consultants (iirc. it was preconfigured ISOs, it was a bit odd) ran on SUSE so there's a tight connection between the two. Since both have German origins it's not surprising.

Indeed, SAP wants you to run their products primarily on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, with RHEL being an "also ran" (despite enjoying full support from SAP).

This despite SLES' controversial and never-working-quite-right "vm.pagecache_limit_mb" kernel parameter (which they're finally ditching in SLES15, I hear).

Don't get me wrong, SLES these days is a mature, high-quality distro (I'm working with hundreds of installations running SAP products), but sometimes they do weird things, like bumping kernel version from 2.6 to 3.0 within one service pack (sometimes back in SLES10 or SLES11 days, iirc).

Linus talks about the 2.6 -> 3.0 change here: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1107.2/01843.html

>As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it's simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux.

All they said was that it was weird. Even with the explanation I'd still agree that it's weird.

"a bit odd" seems normal for SAP (where some value of "a bit" is "a lot")

Yes, SAP seems to be the main selling point ... "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was the first OS for SAP HANA and SUSE continues to be a co-innovation partner for solutions such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Data Hub and many more. ... "

... and the cloud versions of these products are SuSE based as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com