In case you haven’t already seen it, for the KDE 30 year anniversary, KDE have had a documentary done. It’s a really great watch and a very high quality production.

Naturally it covers the most significant events in KDE history, but in the process also touches a lot on other parts of the eco system such as Qt, GNU, Linux and GNOME. And of course it includes legendary SUSE developers.

I love these people, and the rest of the FOSS community!

This is a roundup of articles from the openSUSE community listed on planet.opensuse.org. This community blog feed aggregator lists the featured highlights below from Oct. 9 - 15.

This week highlights KDE’s 30th anniversary and the premiere of the KDE documentary, the launch of Plasma 6.8 as the 30th Anniversary Edition, five Tumbleweed snapshots headlined by Linux Kernel 7.2.9, Samba 4.25.0 and LibreOffice 26.8.1.1, a mid-October Tumbleweed ARM update, the 31st KDE Frameworks 6 update, Open Build Service’s new Content Moderation feature, the Advanced Weather Widget plasmoid, episode 7 of the “La era de las distros” podcast on Madrid’s MAX distribution, Linux Saloon 223 on Omarchy, an openQA slow-test deep dive, GNOME’s refreshed Pixels wallpaper and more.

Here is a summary and links for each post:

30 Years and 1 Day: KDE Keeps Giving Me Freedom and Functionality with the Best Design

Victorhck shares a personal user’s tribute to KDE the day after the project’s 30th anniversary, reflecting on 15 years of using KDE with openSUSE since 2011. He expresses gratitude for the freedom, flexibility and polish of Plasma and KDE applications, praises the global community behind the project, and encourages readers to support KDE with donations, including a nod to celebrating 30 years with 30€.

KDE Documentary

Sebastian Kügler reflects on KDE’s 30th anniversary and the premiere of the KDE documentary, in which he was interviewed as a former release manager, Plasma core developer and KDE e.V. board member. He also hints at a return to Free Software development with two new apps tied to his hobbies.

Plasma 6.8 Released, 30th Anniversary Edition

The KDE Blog celebrates KDE’s 30th anniversary with the release of Plasma 6.8, highlighting dozens of improvements across the desktop experience. Key changes include the new Hanabi default wallpaper, Nepali calendar support, GTK4 window decoration fixes, a redesigned Discover with AppStream previews and a modernized Flatpak permissions panel.

Pixels Wallpaper Update

Jakub Steiner shares an early look at the updated Pixels wallpaper for GNOME, built from app icons redrawn as chunky pixel art. This time the wallpaper ships in nine color variants, and he asks the community for feedback on contrast, backgrounds and grain before the release.

KDE’s 30th Anniversary – Congratulations to the Whole Community!

The KDE Blog marks KDE’s 30th anniversary on Oct. 14, tracing the project from Matthias Ettrich’s original 1996 announcement to today’s worldwide community. Baltasar Ortega reflects on the people and values of KDE and previews the Plasma 6.8 launch arriving the next day.

Thirty Years of KDE

Cornelius Schumacher looks back on 30 years of KDE, from joining in 1999 to the project’s current strength with the Steam Deck reach and Sovereign Tech Fund investment. He reflects on how KDE’s commitment to freedom shaped his career and life, and notes the KDE documentary premiering for the anniversary.

Tumbleweed ARM Update by mid-October

openSUSE News details Tumbleweed ARM updates from mid-September through mid-October, covering the kernel’s move from 7.2.6 to 7.2.9 with a long list of SBC and AArch64 security fixes. Highlights include binutils 2.47 with Armv9.6 and Armv9.7 instructions, QEMU 11.1.2 virtualization fixes and refreshed Wi-Fi and Bluetooth firmware for Raspberry Pi, Qualcomm and MediaTek boards.

Advanced Weather Display with Advanced Weather Widget – Plasmoids for Plasma 6 (41)

The KDE Blog presents Advanced Weather Widget, the 41st entry in its Plasma 6 plasmoids series, a feature-rich weather applet by pnedyalkov. It supports multiple providers with automatic failover, detailed current conditions, radar maps, configurable KDE notifications and translations in 18 languages.

The Golden Age of LINUX in Spain. How MAX Was Created (with Its Original Developers) – Episode 7 of the Podcast “La era de las distros”

The KDE Blog promotes episode 7 of the podcast “La era de las distros,” which tells the story of Madrid’s MAX educational distribution through its original developers Ismail Ali-Gago, Carlos Salamanca and Mario Izquierdo. The episode covers the project’s humble technical beginnings and its role in digital sovereignty for Madrid’s classrooms.

The Content Moderation Feature Is Out For Everyone

The Open Build Service announces that its Content Moderation feature is now available to all users, giving the community tools to report, review and act on spam, abuse and other misconduct. Any user can report comments, users, projects, packages and requests using predefined categories.

31st KDE Frameworks 6 Update and the KDBusAddons Library

The KDE Blog covers the 31st update of KDE Frameworks 6, released Oct. 9, and continues its library deep-dive series with KDBusAddons. The post explains how KDBusAddons simplifies D-Bus work in Qt and KDE applications and provides a full listing of the Frameworks library tiers.

Linux Saloon 223 | Omarchy

Nathan Wolf hosts Linux Saloon 223 focused on Omarchy, with news including Discord’s age verification, Thunderbird for iOS and Ubuntu’s wiki overhaul. The episode also notes the shrinking Linux share among Steam users, Reddit dropping RSS feeds and upcoming show topics.

Anatomy of a slow test module

Zoltán Balogh dissects a slow support-server test module, explaining why wasted seconds in setup cost roughly three times as much since parallel nodes wait on the master. Through small, measured iterations he cut the SLE 15 SP7 SAP HANA scenario setup from 7m 37s to about 5m 10s and shares the patterns and lessons learned.

Final Touches for 6.8 – This Week in Plasma

The KDE Blog translates Nate Graham’s latest “This Week in Plasma,” covering the final polish on Plasma 6.8 ahead of its Oct. 14 release. The roundup lists interface tweaks for the weather applet, KRunner and Spectacle, plus bug fixes spanning Plasma 6.6.7 through 6.9 and Frameworks 6.32.

Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2026/41

Dominique Leuenberger and Victorhck review five Tumbleweed snapshots (1001, 1002, 1003, 1005 and 1007), headlined by systemd 261.3, Mesa 26.2.4, NetworkManager 1.58.1, LibreOffice 26.8.1.1, Linux Kernel 7.2.9 and Samba 4.25.0. The roundup also notes a cups-filters2 revert that restored PDF and image printing, and previews staging updates including Plasma 6.8 Beta 2, libvirt 12.8.0 and fmt 12.2.0.

Barcelona Free Software: 30 Years of KDE

The KDE Blog announces a Barcelona Free Software talk on Oct. 21 celebrating KDE’s 30th anniversary, featuring KDE e.V. member and former KDE España president Albert Astals Cid. The event at Akasha Hub will share history, anecdotes and reflections on 30 years of KDE, followed by pizza and drinks courtesy of KDE España.

Tiny Wins for Packagers: End-of-Week Update (2026-10-09)

The Open Build Service posts its end-of-week roundup for packagers, highlighting fixes like copying special collectbuildenv packages, correcting dates on the Blame page and retriggering scmsync package syncs. The update also lists improvements to osc request listings, “osc fork” arguments and git-obs configuration handling.

View more blogs or learn to publish your own on planet.opensuse.org.

This October I attended both the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2026 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and Open Source Summit Europe 2026 in Prague, practically back to back. Two conferences, two continents and one very long trip.

Getting to both was quite an adventure. The way there was a train from Mikulov to Břeclav, another train to Vienna and on to Vienna airport, a flight via Qatar to Jakarta and one more flight to Yogyakarta. On the way back on Tuesday it was Yogyakarta, Jakarta, Qatar, Vienna, then a three hour stop at home in Mikulov before getting in a car and driving to Prague. All in all I spent at least 35 hours on planes, trains and cars. It was worth every hour, because the conversations I had at both events were priceless.

openSUSE.Asia Summit 2026, Yogyakarta

We had two amazing days of conference in Yogyakarta. A huge thank you goes to the organizers, including Edwin, Siska and the whole openSUSE Indonesia team, for putting together such a well organized event. I have always been met with great hospitality in Indonesia, and this year was no exception.

The opening ceremony

The summit started with a proper opening ceremony. After the Indonesian national anthem, dancers dressed like princesses gave a lovely traditional performance, carrying a golden chest. During the performance they presented each special guest with a leaf. The special guests were the hosting professor from the university and most of the European speakers, who were seated in the first row.

We do not really have this kind of ceremony at the beginning of events in Europe, and I think that is a pity. It set a warm and festive tone for the whole summit.

Community news

Congratulations to Dhenandi, the newly appointed leader of the openSUSE Indonesia community, whose appointment was announced during the event. We are looking forward to seeing the community grow under your leadership.

A special congratulations also goes to Siska on her return from maternity leave. Her little son was with us at the conference, and as Siska put it, he was the reason she had been away. Welcome back, and welcome to the youngest summit attendee!

Each day of the summit also had a quiz prepared by the Indonesian team, and honestly, it is far superior to our existing quiz.opensuse.org. It combined knowledge with agility. You had to tap on a moving lizard, swipe in the direction the lizard was rotating, or tap the button with the name of the color matching the displayed chameleon, while the text itself was written in a different color. :-) We hope we can adopt their quiz for our European events as well.

I managed to win first place on the first day, but on the second day I only made it to the top 20, because I am really bad at finger agility. :-))) Either way, it was huge fun for everyone. I gave my first prize, a mechanical keyboard, to the youngest attendee of the conference, Siska’s son.

It was also wonderful to see a group of roughly 30 women taking part in the summit. They were everywhere: among the organizers like Siska, among the many volunteers who kept the event running, and on stage as speakers, including Hamnah. Thank you all for making the summit what it was!

If you could not make it to Yogyakarta, the organizers put together highlight videos from both days of the summit.

Day one highlights

Day two highlights

Recordings of the talks should follow in the upcoming days on the openSUSE Indonesia YouTube channel, so keep an eye on it.

Conversations that matter

I really appreciated the discussion with NevaCloud about communication and getting openSUSE Leap images published on their platform as early as possible. Having fresh Leap images available on day one at regional cloud providers makes a real difference for users in the region.

I also enjoyed meeting the BlankOn Linux team and showing them how to build custom images in the Open Build Service. That includes images based on dpkg, since KIWI supports them too. OBS is not only for RPM based distributions, and it was great to see their interest.

One talk I particularly enjoyed was about gaming. It led to a follow up hacking effort on a simple image that boots straight into Steam in fullscreen mode through gamescope. The image is based on my fork of the opensuse-oem-image in OBS.

It was amazing to finally meet so many people in person whom I usually only see online. James, Ayan (Himsec), Sunny, Simon from Australia and Edwin are all long time regulars at our openSUSE weekly meetings and in our virtual bar, so the summit was a super nice opportunity to finally see each other face to face. I spent pretty much every evening hacking on something with Himsec or having deep conversations, also with Siska and Hamnah.

A better time for our Tuesday weekly meeting

One big takeaway from those evening discussions is that our “Asia friendly” Tuesday weekly meeting was not so Asia friendly after all. Attending a meeting at 5pm Indonesian time, when most people are still at work or commuting home, is quite challenging.

As a result I have announced moving the meeting from 12:00 to 14:00 CEST, which is roughly 7pm in Indonesia. The first meeting in the new slot last Tuesday had more than 10 attendees, so it definitely works out. The feedback was that 8pm would be even better, so the meeting would not clash with dinner time. Something similar already works well in the other direction: the Thursday community meetup is at 9pm for Europeans, which is a cozy time to relax and have fun with others after work.

The current schedule of all our meetings is always available at calendar.opensuse.org.

Kudos takes off in Indonesia

One thing that made me really happy was the adoption of the openSUSE Kudos recognition platform by the openSUSE Indonesia community. People instantly started using it to thank each other, and it was great to watch the kudos flowing during the summit.

With the new teams feature, a few people also asked to join teams such as the openSUSE Board, the Election Officials or the openSUSE Release Team. The enthusiasm is very welcome, but a team in Kudos reflects work that is already happening, and joining one does not grant a role in the project. Many teams are open and you can simply join the ones you contribute to. Others have a process behind them. Board members are elected by the openSUSE members, Election Officials should be openSUSE members who want to help run the elections, and the Release Team grows out of work on the build and release pipeline.

To make this clearer, Kudos now supports invite only teams. Such teams do not accept join requests, and new members can only be added through an invitation from an existing member.

So please ask to join the teams you already contribute to. And if you would like to get involved with any of the teams above, reach out to them. They will be happy to help you get started.

Coffee, turtles and aquascaping

After the two days of conference, we went on an offsite trip, and it is something I will remember for a long time. We visited Sambisari Temple, an ancient Hindu temple that lay buried under volcanic ash for centuries before it was rediscovered. Then we headed to the beach and visited Kelompok Konservasi Penyu Mino Raharjo, a turtle conservation group at Pantai Goa Cemara, and released baby turtles from their sanctuary into the sea. It was a super nice ceremony, and watching the little turtles make their way into the waves was a beautiful way to close the summit. We wrapped up the day with a lovely seafood lunch at Rumah Makan Dapur Cemara, close to the turtle sanctuary.

Everybody there was very welcoming. While we were talking about coffee prices in Europe and the 2 EUR threshold for an espresso in Italy, the locals could not believe that people pay 2 EUR or more for a single coffee. A moment later I had a free coffee in front of me. That says a lot about the hospitality of the local people.

On the way back to the venue we made one more stop, at a workshop where we made our own scarves using the traditional batik technique. You simply apply wax to a template, and after dyeing, it turns into a beautiful blue scarf. Going home with a scarf you made yourself is pretty cool!

Indonesian coffee deserves its own paragraph. Every cup I had was of the highest standard, no matter if it was a small restaurant by the beach or a specialty coffee shop.

Aquascaping is my new private hobby, so of course I could not resist going on a little hunt for local aquascaping shops. Edwin picked me up in the middle of it and took me to a quick meetup with the local community at Hayati coffee. It was such a great place that I had to stop there more than once. :-)

Coffee at the summit itself was supplied by Kopi Toedjoeh, one of the event sponsors. I actually brought a few bags with me to Prague and gave them away at Open Source Summit Europe. People were super excited to get their hands on it!

Huge thanks to all the sponsors who made the summit possible.

LinuxDays 2026, Prague

I was sad that I could not make it to LinuxDays, which took place in Prague at the same time as the openSUSE.Asia Summit. The openSUSE booth crew led by Martin Pluskal did an excellent job there. Many thanks to Martin, Dan Čermák, Jan Baier, Avinesh Kumar, Martina Stuchlíková and everybody else who helped at LinuxDays.

Open Source Summit Europe 2026, Prague

openSUSE and SUSE have been a platinum sponsor of Open Source Summit Europe for many years, and this year we almost did not sponsor at all. I fought really hard to find the budget to make it happen, so I am very happy that we were there and that the booth turned out to be such a success.

The booth was led by Dan Čermák, who stepped up for the role long before I knew I would have a conflict with my trip back from Indonesia. Many thanks to Dan and to Martina Stuchlíková, who also took care of transporting all the booth material. I joined them from the second day on.

openSUSE on a 64 core RISC-V workstation

The highlight of the booth was Professor Pavel Píša from the Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT). He brought a Milk-V Pioneer, a 64 core RISC-V board running openSUSE Tumbleweed, and used it to demonstrate QtRvSim, the RISC-V simulator developed by him and his students. The university uses the Open Build Service to build and publish QtRvSim, which made it a perfect showcase of our collaboration in the education sector. It also showed that RISC-V is capable of being a decent workstation today.

This demo brought many, many guests to the booth. We scanned a bit over 300 visitors, and the real number was possibly closer to 400. We simply spent a lot of time talking to people and less time scanning their badges. :-) Booths with less interaction might have been more successful at scanning, but the conversations we had with our visitors were amazing.

RISC-V was a big hit at the whole event. openEuler, which had one of the largest booths at the summit, showcased Tekken running on RISC-V. And from what we saw at our own booth, people are really interested in seeing powerful RISC-V hardware rather than yet another small single board computer.

People and connections

Among the visitors were people from N26 bank, with whom we talked about “European Linux”.

I was happy to connect David Heidelberg from the Czech and Slovak mobile Linux community with Adrian Campos Garrido, who works on openSUSE images for devices such as the PinePhone.

It was awesome to meet Mr. Müller from Bender Robotics, who uses openQA for their embedded testing. He showed us their instance and was looking for best practices for writing tests that do not need to be changed too often. I connected him with Oliver Kurz from our QA department and invited the team to our public QE sessions on Jitsi, which happen every Friday. You can find them at calendar.opensuse.org.

There were many other interested companies as well, like the OpenAtom Foundation, who sent their regards to our Dr. T (Thomas Di Giacomo), whom they had met at other events before.

I also got in touch with the SAP Open Source team and invited them to have a booth at the openSUSE Conference 2027, which I am organizing in Prague from 11 to 13 June 2027. It is hard to say SUSE and not think of SAP, and it would be great to give the SAP team a chance to showcase the open source projects they are working on to our community. We would love to see them there!

Visitors at the SUSE booth could also take part in our digital sovereignty quiz, and everyone who reached a good enough score went home with a chameleon plushie.

Looking ahead

I came back from Prague with a big backlog of new LinkedIn contacts and plenty of new opportunities for collaboration. These include cloud providers, and also banks and other companies that are considering moving away from AWS and similar platforms. There is a lot of follow up work ahead, and I am looking forward to it.

If there is one thing we could really use next time, it is more space. Between the university collaboration, the RISC-V demo and the steady stream of visitors, the booth was busy most of the time.

If you missed the talks in Prague, the recordings should appear in the upcoming days on The Linux Foundation YouTube channel.

Thank you

Many thanks to all the speakers, organizers, volunteers and sponsors of the openSUSE.Asia Summit 2026, and to all the people who helped secure our presence at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague. Thank you also to everyone who staffed a booth or simply stopped by for a chat.

I hope to see many of you again at the openSUSE Conference 2027 in Prague from 11 to 13 June 2027!

For more than 20 years, I’ve been part of the KDE community, one of the largest and most impactful Free and Open Source software community world-wide. Yesterday, KDE turned 30 and this went accompanied with the premiere of the KDE documentary.
As former release manager, Plasma core developer and KDE e.V. board member, I’ve also been interviewed. A fairly prominent NPC role went out to Skippie, my cat.

Lately, I have been back into Free Software development, working on two apps that are closely related to hobbies of mine. Watch this space for news! Something nice has been cooking!

Usually I blog about new additions to the GNOME wallpapers after a release, to give some behind the scenes look on how they were produced. This time I'm asking for some feedback beforehand.

Pixels has shipped as a wallpaper before. The wallpaper landed back in 2021 and keeps getting refreshed as new Circle apps join the lineup, and 47 added LCD and LCD-rainbow, revealing the curator's pixelart kink.

The raw material is a side project years in the making — app icons redrawn as chunky pixels (Pixels, Mo' Pixels, Revert That Vector Nonsense!).

The idea and layout remains the same as the old wallpaper. This time that's more than two variants though. The old Adwaita default used to cycle morning, day and night variants through a slideshow. While we switched to the dark/light variants, the format is still understood today. Thus pixelart comes in not 2, not 3, but 9 color variants. And here's where I'd like your feedback. Do you like the focus on contrast and having the whole set with dark background colors? Should there be more bright colors in the mix? Do you think the grain goes against the spirit of the pixel art? Is the small grid too toned down with the depth fog?

As always, the Blender project files are available in wallpaper-assets if you want to poke at the node setup yourself:

As with any wallpaper, don't judge it based on a preview, regardless of how large you view it. Apply it, use it. The most straightforward way to test GNOME development is with GNOME OS. It ships pixels and all the other wallpapers.

The fact this movie tanked at the box office just makes the ride all the more enjoyable. I had a bad headache and had to call off the screening with a friend yesterday. Thursday is when the movies rotate in our part of the world where we use the un-American units, so I thought I'd missed yet another great cinematic experience. Luckily they still showed it in a small neighboring town, to the two of us and two other people, with an introduction by a charming young person.

I don't remember anything these days, but I clearly remember when I saw Dr. Strangelove in Amherst, NH, in 1993. I was completely taken by the humor, despite thinking I'd never enjoy an ancient movie like that. It's probably way longer between my viewing and today than it was between then and the actual production of it. I don't wanna check.

Anyhow, this is masterfully done cinema, and all four of us laughed out loud at the horrors we saw. Absolute must-see.

★★★★★

When I joined KDE in 1999 I already thought of it as a mature project. I used the KDE desktop every day, and I was delighted with what it could do and how it felt. I had no idea that this would be one of the most impactful decisions of my life, or where it would lead me.

Today we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the original announcement of KDE. The project is still alive and kicking. I still use it every day, just like millions of other people. Not only because it's great software, but because of the values it embodies.

KDE stands for freedom and being able to shape your own destiny. As the KDE vision says: "A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy." While I originally joined for the technology, this is what made me stay.

One of my favorite pictures illustrating the spirit of the community is the group picture of Akademy in Dublin in 2006. Brilliant people having fun working towards a shared purpose of digital freedom.

KDE gets a wonderful present for its birthday. The KDE documentary is premiering today. It tells the story of the founding, the rapid early development, and the license conflicts. How it became a solid product used by many people, and then put it all at risk with KDE 4. How we learned from that and turned it into this extremely resilient and lively community it still is today. I'm happy I could contribute to this story, and that I'm one of the people telling it in the documentary.

For me, KDE shaped my career and my life, and gave me the opportunity to grow and learn. It led to things I would never have expected when I started: my code running on millions of computers, talking to hundreds of developers at conferences, sitting at the negotiation table with Nokia in Helsinki, consulting as an expert in the German parliament. And much more.

Today, KDE is maybe stronger than ever. We reached a lot of new users with the Steam Deck. The Sovereign Tech Fund is investing more than a million euros in KDE. With the strategic goals the community set this year, we are addressing enterprise, documentation, and styling. It shows how much the project has matured, beyond what I could ever have imagined. It also shows in its contributors. While contributors leave over time, new generations come in every year and keep the community growing over the long run, combining stability and rejuvenation.

I'm proud and grateful. Proud of what the KDE community achieved. Grateful that I could be part of this amazing group of people. A team nobody could have hired.

Happy birthday, KDE.

There were a few software package updates for openSUSE Tumbleweed ARM this month with snapshots reaching the ARM port.

The second half of September and the first half of October carried the Linux kernel from 7.2.6 through 7.2.9 with a steady run of SBC and AArch64 security fixes, while binutils 2.47 added the newest Armv9.6 and Armv9.7 instructions, QEMU reached 11.1.2 with Raspberry Pi and ARM virtualization fixes, and firmware updates refreshed Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support for Raspberry Pi and Qualcomm and MediaTek boards.

Raspberry Pi

The kernel-firmware-brcm update refreshes the Cypress cyfmac43455 SDIO firmware, the Wi-Fi chip used on the Raspberry Pi 3, 4 and 5, so wireless reliability improves on those boards. The raspberrypi-firmware-dt package fixes a regression in the SRAM range (bsc#1282097), and QEMU 11.1.2 hardens the emulated BCM2835 interrupt controller by rejecting out-of-range FIQ source values (hw/intc/bcm2835_ic). The GRUB2 aarch64-efi package also gained SBAT metadata to satisfy shim SBAT dependency checks (bsc#1278729).

Rockchip & Other SBCs

Firmware coverage widened across the boards. kernel-firmware-qcom added ADSP, CDSP and GPU firmware for the Hawi and Maili platforms, the Radxa Dragon Q8B (sc8280xp), QCM6490, sa8775p, qcs8300, qcs615 and Rubik Pi 3, plus GPU and Wi-Fi firmware for the SHIFT6mq (sdm845). Media firmware added Gen2 VPU binaries for Hawi, Maili, sc8280xp and Glymur, and the ath12k and Bluetooth firmware brought new board files and QCA2066 and WCN7750 (Maili) support.

Kernel 7.2.8 fixed an Allwinner sun4i timer issue (CVE-2026-93219), and kernel 7.2.9 hardened the MediaTek mt7921 Wi-Fi driver against malformed CLC firmware records (CVE-2026-98159). bluez made a large jump to 5.87 with LE Audio, BAP/BASS and HFP additions, then fixed a UUID discovery crash and an A2DP remote SEP cache issue that broke codec negotiation on some LE Audio headsets. NetworkManager 1.58.1 fixed auto-connect to SAE (WPA3) networks and the normalization of Bluetooth NAP connections.

i.MX & NXP

Kernel 7.2.7 fixed an IRQ leak in the nxp-pit clocksource driver used on i.MX SoCs (CVE-2026-89769), and kernel 7.2.8 stopped a USB Type-C switch leak in the fsl-imx8mq PHY driver (CVE-2026-93225). SDL3 3.4.18 fixed KMSDRM initialization on i.MX 6 hardware.

aarch64 Virtualization, UEFI & Toolchain

QEMU 11.1.2 is the virtualization highlight, fixing ARM register handling in the HVF and WHPX accelerators, treating MDCCSR_EL0 as read-as-zero, correcting the ARM_CP_CONST sync path and the ENCODE_AA64_CP_REG argument order, and adding an ARM regression test alongside the TCG fold_multiply2 fix.

binutils 2.47 brings the biggest toolchain news with the remaining Armv9.6 instructions (+sme-mop4, +sme-tmop, +ssve-bitperm, +ssve-fexpa), several Armv9.7 extensions (+f16f32dot, +f16f32mm, +f16mm, +gcie, +lscp, +mtetc, +sme2p3, +sve-b16mm, +sve2p3, +tlbid), future POE2 and vMTE extensions, and an aarch64 objdump -M annotate fix. A GNU Compiler Collection 16 update fixed an internal compiler error building Firefox on ARM (bsc#1268791).

ovmf dropped the DEBUG_TO_MEM build option for AArch64 because it caused softdog reboot failures (bsc#1272814). sdbootutil improved encrypted-device detection with RAID and btrfs RAID1, uses bootctl to generate the random seed, detects a full grubenv and fixes the GRUB2 EFI bootcounter and loader_conf_set for paths.

glibc patched a resolv search-list assertion failure (CVE-2026-8674) and a $ORIGIN rpath issue in AT_SECURE programs (CVE-2026-86805); elfutils 0.196 added AArch64 and 32-bit ARM support to libdwfl_stacktrace, and mozilla-nss 3.129 fixed non-Linux arm64 makefile builds. LLVM 23.1.2 and Mesa 26.2.3 and 26.2.4 were bugfix releases, and soxr and highway both gained aarch64/arm build fixes.

Snapshots at a Glance

Snapshot	Kernel	Headline changes
2026-09-19	7.2.6	ovmf drops AArch64 DEBUG_TO_MEM (softdog fix), grub2 SBAT Provides, bluez 5.87 LE Audio, nvidia-open-driver rebuilds
2026-09-21	7.2.6	Mesa 26.2.3, xxhash 0.8.4 prefers NEON over SVE on AArch64, mozilla-nss 3.128
2026-09-24	7.2.7	NXP PIT clocksource IRQ leak fix (CVE-2026-89769), gzip aarch64 build fix, nvidia driver rc rebuild
2026-09-30	7.2.8	binutils 2.47 Armv9.6/9.7, kernel-firmware-brcm cyfmac43455 and qcom ADSP, raspberrypi-firmware-dt SRAM fix, sdbootutil, Allwinner/Tegra/SMMU fixes
2026-10-03	7.2.8	NetworkManager 1.58.1 WPA3 and Bluetooth fixes, gcc16 ARM ICE fix, Mesa 26.2.4
2026-10-07	7.2.9	arm_scmi firmware fixes, mt7921 CLC validation, SDL3 i.MX 6 KMSDRM fix, elfutils ARM stack trace support, glibc CVEs
2026-10-11	7.2.9	QEMU 11.1.2 ARM/HVF and bcm2835 FIQ fixes, libvirt 12.8.0, highway aarch64 LTO workaround, mozilla-nss arm64 build fix

Conclusion

The second half of September and first half of October kept the ARM port moving with the Linux kernel advancing from 7.2.6 to 7.2.9 through a long list of SBC fixes covering Allwinner’s sun4i timer, the Tegra video driver, Arm SMMUv3 teardown, the arm64 page-table walk and a batch of arm_scmi firmware corrections. binutils 2.47 delivered the month’s biggest ARM headline with Armv9.6 and Armv9.7 instruction support, QEMU 11.1.2 fixed ARM HVF/WHPX register handling and the emulated Raspberry Pi interrupt controller, and ovmf removed an AArch64 build option that caused softdog reboot failures. Firmware refreshes for Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips plus the raspberrypi-firmware-dt SRAM fix improved connectivity and stability on boards, while bluez 5.87, NetworkManager 1.58.1, sdbootutil, glibc, elfutils and mozilla-nss rounded out security and toolchain work.

ARM Resources

For ARM-specific discussions and support, subscribe to the openSUSE ARM mailing list and check the openSUSE ARM wiki for device support information, image downloads, and documentation. New and existing ARM users can also join the openSUSE ARM IRC channel for real-time help.

Your contributions and feedback make openSUSE Tumbleweed ARM better with every update. Whether reporting bugs, suggesting features, or participating in community discussions, your involvement is highly valued.

The Content Moderation feature is now available to every user in OBS to combat spam, abuse, and misconduct effectively. It provides a powerful toolset for both users and moderators to report, review, and act on problematic content across OBS. Reporting Any user in OBS can report any misconduct across a wide range of OBS objects: comments, users, projects, packages, and requests. A report can be categorized using predefined categories (like Spam or Forbidden license) to...

The content discusses recent developments in tech and Linux, including news about Discord's age verification, Mozilla Thunderbird for iOS, and Ubuntu's overhaul of its wiki. It highlights the dwindling percentage of Steam users on Linux and Reddit's removal of RSS feeds. Upcoming topics, housekeeping, and participant project links are also mentioned.