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FutureboyLinux Saloon 220 | Early Edition
Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2026/38
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
This week saw the release of 6 snapshots (0910, 0911, 0912, 0914, 0915, and 0916).
The star of this week’s show was undoubtedly KDE, which delivered a stellar triple-header across consecutive releases: KDE Plasma 6.7.5 landed in snapshot 0910, KDE Frameworks 6.30 followed in 0911, and KDE Gear 26.08.1 completed the desktop suite’s major updates in 0912. Beyond the graphical interface, core system integrity was a major focus. Snapshot 0915 brought a crucial security-hardening round, delivering backported glibc CVE fixes alongside security updates for cups, alsa, and gvfs. Snapshot 0916 followed up with further CVE mitigations in freeipmi, 7zip, and xz (fixing a critical invalid memory access bug in the lzma decoders).
Under the hood, snapshot 0915 brought exciting architectural enhancements to Mesa, including enabling the ‘rocket’ Gallium driver for Rockchip NPUs on AArch64 and shipping the ‘Teflon’ TensorFlow Lite delegate in a new subpackage. OpenCV also expanded its media capabilities, enabling native support for both JPEG XL and AVIF, while the Linux Kernel progressed to version 7.2.5 in snapshot 0914.
These 6 snapshots delivered the following updates:
- 389-ds 3.3.1+8c2711bd6
- 7zip 26.03
- bash-completion 2.17.0
- container-selinux 2.251.0
- freeipmi 1.6.19
- fuse3 3.18.3
- gimp 3.2.6
- gnome-maps 50.5
- gnome-software 50.4
- gstreamer 1.28.7
- gtk4 4.22.5
- gvfs 1.60.3
- kbd 2.10.0
- KDE Frameworks 6.30
- KDE Gear 26.08.1
- KDE Plasma 6.7.5
- libgcrypt 1.12.4
- libpcap 1.10.7
- libstorage-ng 4.5.352 & 4.5.353
- Linux Kernel 7.2.5
- llvm23 23.1.1
- openblas 0.3.34
- poppler 26.09.0
- postfix 3.11.7
- python-pip 26.2.1
- selinux-policy 20260910 & 20260914
- shotwell 33.0
- simdutf 9.1.2
- timezone 2026d
- xz 5.8.4
- yast2-python-bindings 5.0.3
- yast2-samba-client 5.0.5
- zchunk 1.5.4
With these updates successfully rolled out, it is time to turn our gaze forward and see what the staging areas are cooking up for the near future:
- Swig 4.5.0: Progress is being made with compatibility updates applied to other packages, such as yast2-python-bindings, but integration issues remain tracked under boo#1275515.
- fontconfig 2.18.3: Still held up as it breaks the AppStream test suite.
- libnettle 4.0.0: Remains explicitly excluded from main staging runs while developers work on resolving test suite breakages in libzypp.
Planet News Roundup
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 Sept. 11 - 17.
This week highlights the release of Agama 24 with a two-for-one announcement covering versions 23 and 24, the beta release of Plasma 6.8 along with its first “This Week in Plasma” review, the first bug-fix update of KDE Gear 26.08 plus feature overviews of Kdenlive and Minuet, the Tumbleweed week 37 review and a September ARM update roundup, Intel’s OpenVINO 2026.4.0 release, the openSUSE Kudos report for August, the reveal of the GNOME 51 wallpapers, and a fond farewell to the Linux Hispano comic strip after 1,144 installments.
Here is a summary and links for each post:
Introducing Enhanced Distribution Support
The Open Build Service blog introduces Enhanced Distribution Support, a beta feature that gives structure to distribution information through a vendor → distribution → release hierarchy, letting maintainers record what they ship, which repositories and architectures each release is built from, and dated lifecycle milestones. It’s an early, purely descriptive first iteration, and the OBS team is asking distribution maintainers what else they need to be able to describe.
OpenVINO 2026.4.0: A New Version Announced
Alessandro’s blog reports on Intel’s OpenVINO 2026.4.0 release, which broadens model support across Intel CPUs, GPUs and NPUs while adding speculative decoding with Multi-Token Prediction. The post also covers EAGLE-3 Tree Drafting, ITT tracing extended to the NPU for VTune, an ASR pipeline for Node.js and idle-model management in the OpenVINO Model Server.
Tumbleweed ARM Updates in September
The openSUSE News blog covers September’s Tumbleweed updates for the ARM port, led by a security-heavy kernel 7.2.5, glibc 2.44 with its large AArch64 push and QEMU 11.1.1. Raspberry Pi owners get a firmware fix that clears up a Wi-Fi scan error, Rockchip and other SBCs receive MediaTek Wi-Fi kernel fixes, and GIMP 3.2.6, shotwell 33.0 and kbd 2.10.0 land AArch64-specific improvements.
GNOME 51 Wallpapers
Jakub Steiner reveals the GNOME 51 wallpaper set, calling the collection evolution rather than revolution as it sticks to its geometric roots. The default is a stylistic touch-up of the GNOME 50 hexagons, images now carry an embedded thumbnail that helps the Appearance panel, and attribution and license data are embedded directly into the files.
Download a Random Linux Hispano Comic Strip in the Terminal
Victorhck shares a pair of scripts for revisiting the 1,144 Linux Hispano comic strips that Danigm published between 2004 and 2026 after the series came to an end. A Python scraper archived every strip into a GitHub repository, while a Bash script picks a random strip and displays it with feh along with its name and publication date.
Syslog-ng repo for Amazon Linux 2023 updated to syslog-ng version 4.12
Peter Czanik reports that his syslog-ng repository for Amazon Linux 2023 has been updated to version 4.12 after a GitHub request finally prompted an update. He recounts how the repo, first created two years ago, sat untouched due to a lack of feedback despite healthy download numbers from Copr, with Java support and slog disabled as in his other repositories.
Kudos August 2026
The openSUSE News blog presents the monthly Kudos report, in which 17 users received 24 kudos and 419 badges were awarded to 251 contributors during August. Bernhard Wiedemann tops the list with five kudos, mostly for his work on Slowroll, and four contributors reached the milestone of 100 Tumbleweed Contributions.
What’s New in Minuet from KDE Gear 26.08, “Enjoy Shiny Stuff” Edition
The KDE Blog closes its KDE Gear 26.08 feature series with Minuet, the music education app that trains the ear through interval, chord, scale and rhythm exercises. Minuet debuts a new interface that works on both desktops and phones, with a reworked home page and navigation sidebar, exercises shown as cards and a search field that filters by translated names and descriptions.
Software Freedom Day 2026
The KDE Blog announces the Dia de la Llibertat del Programari (Software Freedom Day) celebration organized by Caliu on September 19 at the Espai Jove La Fontana in Barcelona, an event where the KDE community is usually well represented. The post translates the Catalan agenda, listing three talks on teaching computing with values, bootstrapping a self-managed forge with Haz-CLI and security on GNU/Linux.
Happy Programmer’s Day
Alessandro’s blog celebrates Programmer’s Day, which falls on the 256th day of the year and explains why the number 256, or 2^8, matters in computing. The post thanks developers for turning coffee into software, errors into lessons and ideas into innovation.
Innit
Jakub Steiner shares how he produced the tune “Innit” for his weeklybeats 2026 project on the Elektron Analog Four rather than his usual Dirtywave M8. After years of avoiding them, he finally learned the box’s performance macros, which bundle up to five track parameters onto a single knob and make live performance far less stressful than pre-programming a sequence.
Plasma 6.8 Beta Released – This Week in Plasma
The KDE Blog translates Nate Graham’s weekly Plasma development report covering the 6.8 beta. Kup joins Plasma as its backup system, clipboard and MIME-action settings become far clearer, the on-screen keyboard button now behaves as expected on lock and login screens, and KWin gains support for the Wayland commit_timing protocol.
Linux Saloon 219 | Butterbian and ButterKnife Distribution Exploration
Nathan Wolf posts episode 219 of the Linux Saloon podcast, covering activities around the Vintage Computer Fest Midwest. The episode gathers user experiences with the Butterknife and Butterbian distributions through polls and links out to upcoming events and participant projects.
First Update of KDE Gear 26.08
The KDE Blog presents the first update of KDE Gear 26.08, released almost a month after the feature set, bringing more stability, better translations and small improvements. It lists resolved issues across apps, libraries and widgets, including an arrow-orientation fix in KDE Connect, room-map handling in Kongress and an unexpected crash when saving documents in Okular.
Plasma 6.8 Beta Released
The KDE Blog reports that the beta of Plasma 6.8 has been released and highlights changes drawn from its changelog, from the new Hanabi wallpaper replacing Waterfall in Breeze and Nepali calendar support to GTK4 window decoration fixes, an AppStream Preview backend in Discover and a QML rewrite of DrKonqi’s coredump viewer. It encourages users to install the beta and report bugs to help polish the release.
Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2026/37
Dominique Leuenberger and Victorhck review the four Tumbleweed snapshots (0904, 0907, 0908 and 0909) of week 2026/37, which delivered Linux kernel 7.2.3 and 7.2.4, LibreOffice 26.8.0.3, QEMU 11.1.1, zypper 1.14.101 and more.
Tiny Wins for Packagers: End-of-Week Update
The Open Build Service blog shares its end-of-week “Tiny Wins” update, which shipped a fix preventing a second click on the repository dropdown after an autocomplete selection and ensured the generated SBOM includes the SPDX V3 createdBy field. It also reports that build.opensuse.org served 22.8 million HTTP requests and produced 2.38 million package builds over the last seven days.
Agama: Releasing Version 24
The Agama blog announces Agama 24 in a two-for-one post covering versions 23 and 24 after a stabilization phase focused on testing and polish. Language, keyboard and time zone now share a single searchable form, network connections can be bound to devices through a sortable device table, and JSON search sections gained much more expressive device matching.
View more blogs or learn to publish your own on planet.opensuse.org.
Building Flatpaks Locally
I like to run my Linux as an operating system, so I usually resort to toolbox for packages and development. However flatpak-builder is distributed as a flatpak itself, so here's how you can go about building flatpaks yourself for when GNOME Nighlies are not enough.
On GNOME OS, some developer tools like git and toolbox are in the base image.
Installing flatpak-builder
flatpak-builder isn't part of base OS though. It is distributed on Flathub as org.flatpak.Builder. Install it like any other Flatpak:
flatpak install flathub org.flatpak.Builder
Building and Installing Locally
Here's how I build Shaper, an icon designer for GNOME symbolics.
flatpak run --command=flatpak-builder \
org.flatpak.Builder --user --install \
--force-clean build-dir org.gnome.design.Shaper.json
And that's it!
Developer extension
There are some extra tools for development available for GNOME OS. You get them by enabling the developer system extension:
sudo updatectl enable devel --now
So instead of installing the flatpak, you get flatpak-builder as a utility.
Fixing a UTF-8 Encoding Crash in OBS’s Workflow YAML Downloader
A few weeks ago I picked up my first real bug in the Open Build Service (OBS) codebase, part of the openSUSE project: a production crash that had been showing up on Errbit every time a GitHub workflow config with the “wrong” character in it got synced. Here’s what broke, why it broke, and how the fix closed it out.
The bug
OBS lets you wire up a GitHub repository so pushes trigger a workflow, things like package rebuilds via webhooks. When that webhook fires, Workflows::YAMLDownloader pulls down the workflow's YAML config file from GitHub and writes it to a Tempfile so OBS can parse it.
The crash looked like this in production:
"\xE2" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8
Thrown from IO#write, inside Workflows::YAMLDownloader#create_temp_file.
Why it happened
GitHub’s API returns file contents Base64-encoded. OBS decodes that with Base64.decode64, which hands back a plain Ruby string, but that string is tagged with the ASCII-8BIT encoding (Ruby's way of saying "this is just raw bytes, no assumptions about text"). That's correct and expected; Base64.decode64 has no way to know what encoding the original bytes represent.
The problem shows up one step later. Rails’ Tempfile defaults to expecting UTF-8 when you write to it. So when OBS calls .write with an ASCII-8BIT string, Ruby tries to transcode it, converting the bytes from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 on the fly. That's fine for plain ASCII content. But the moment the YAML file contains a multi-byte UTF-8 character, an em dash, a smart quote, anything outside the ASCII range, Ruby has no valid transcoding rule to apply, and it raises Encoding::UndefinedConversionError.
In short: a perfectly valid UTF-8 file was crashing because Ruby thought it was starting from ASCII-8BIT and tried to “translate” bytes that didn’t need translating at all.
The fix
The core of it comes down to one call:
decoded_content.force_encoding('UTF-8')added right before the Tempfile write. The full diff landed at three lines changed across two files: the fix itself in yaml_downloader.rb, plus a matching update to the spec covering that code path, so the regression is actually tested going forward and not just patched.
The key distinction with the fix itself is force_encoding versus a real transcode. force_encoding doesn't touch a single byte; it just relabels the string, telling Ruby "trust me, these bytes are already UTF-8." Since the bytes coming out of Base64.decode64 genuinely were valid UTF-8 all along (they just carried the wrong encoding tag), relabeling is exactly the correct fix. No transcoding attempt means no UndefinedConversionError, because there's nothing left to convert. Ruby writes the bytes exactly as they are.
What I’d tell someone hitting this themselves
If you’re decoding Base64 content in Ruby and writing it somewhere that expects text, check what encoding the decoded string is actually tagged with (str.encoding) before you assume it matches what the destination wants. Base64.decode64 will hand you ASCII-8BIT regardless of what the original content was; it's on you to correctly re-tag it if you know better, and force_encoding is the right tool for that when you're confident the bytes are already valid in the target encoding. Reach for a real transcode (.encode) only when the bytes genuinely aren't in the target encoding yet.
Getting the PR in
This was my first contribution to OBS, and I want to call out something small that made a real difference: I asked the maintainer, hennevogel, if it was okay for me to take the issue before opening a PR. His reply was simple: “no need to ask me. Just PR small things :)”, which told me a lot about how this project, and the openSUSE community around it, actually wants newcomers to engage. Low friction, just ship the fix.
The PR (#20236) was small, three lines changed across two files, reviewed, and merged. Small fix, but a good first real look at how OBS’s Rails frontend talks to external Git hosts, and that boundary, it turns out, is where interesting bugs tend to live.
Introducing Enhanced Distribution Support
Tumbleweed ARM Updates in September
There were a few software package updates for openSUSE Tumbleweed ARM this month with snapshots reaching the ARM port.
September’s snapshots of the ARM port carried the Linux kernel to a security-heavy 7.2.5. There was a jump to glibc 2.44 with its large AArch64 push, and QEMU reaching 11.1.1. Raspberry Pi owners get a firmware fix that clears up a Wi-Fi scan error, the Networking Stack received security patches, and GIMP 3.2.6 brings AArch64-specific fixes.
Raspberry Pi
This month’s raspberrypi-firmware update prevents the spurious “-52” error message that could appear during Wi-Fi scans (bsc#1215134), so scanning for networks is quieter on boards where the firmware reported a phantom failure. The Linux kernel 7.2.4 update fixed a memory leak in the brcmfmac driver’s SDIO control path, which reduces memory pressure over long uptimes on the onboard Cypress Wi-Fi chip used across recent Pi models.
Rockchip & Other SBCs
Owners of Rockchip and other single-board computers get kernel fixes for the MediaTek Wi-Fi chipsets that many boards ship with, including headroom fixes for USB/SDIO transfers on mt7925 and EEPROM size validation on the mt7915 and mt7996 drivers, which protects against malformed device data (bsc#1012628). kernel-firmware-qcom adds DSP firmware for the Qualcomm x1e80100, nord and qcs8300 platforms, improving modem, DSP and graphics support. dracut now includes leds-qcom-lpg in the aarch64 DRM module set, keeping RGB indicator LEDs working when booting from an initrd. Finally, wireless-regdb enables 320 MHz channels for Hong Kong, updates South Africa’s rules, and drops the 60 GHz DFS flag for Togo.
i.MX & NXP
Developers working with NXP hardware gain the imx8mp-evk machine type in QEMU 11.1.1, which emulates the i.MX 8M Plus Evaluation Kit and makes it easier to test software for that platform without physical hardware. The kernel 7.2.3 update fixed the mxs-dcp crypto engine’s source scatterlist length access and improved the Data Co-Processor security block on i.MX System on Chips that use it for accelerated encryption. These changes make NXP hardware slightly more accessible to both emulation and crypto workloads.
aarch64 Virtualization, UEFI & Toolchain
QEMU 11.1.1 is the virtualization highlight of the month, advancing the emulator with Universal Flash Storage emulation for Write Booster and Host-Initiated Defragmentation based on the UFS 4.1 specification, plus vhost-host-user support for offloading real-time clock handling through virtio-rtc. The ARM targets gain new architectural CPU features, and the virt board can now specify cache topology. The ARM-specific fixes include a regression test and boundary-case fix for the SVE2 whilewr/whilerw instructions and a fix for arm_gicv3 kconfig selection, and openSUSE disables GCS linker validation in the spec to keep the aarch64 build working.
glibc 2.44 delivers the strongest AArch64 additions in months. On targets with the Guarded Control Stack extension, glibc now locks all GCS operations, including status, write-on-shadow-stack and push-to-shadow-stack, immediately after enabling GCS with an ENFORCED or OVERRIDE policy, closing a window where a process could still mutate its own shadow stack. Special-case paths for log, exp, sin, cas, sinh, cosh, asinh, acosh and atanh are vectorized for both SVE and AdvSIMD, and vector powr variants are added, which speeds up floating-point-heavy code on capable Cortex-X and Neoverse cores.
ovmf advances to edk2-stable202608, refreshing the UEFI firmware that backs the qemu-uefi-aarch64 subpackage. The update adds AArch64 host test coverage across SecurityPkg, CryptoPkg, PrmPkg, DynamicTablesPkg, MdeModulePkg and MdePkg, plus UnitTestFrameworkPkg support for GCC AArch64, which strengthens firmware quality assurance for arm64 virtual machines. The EFI Memory Attributes Protocol workaround is dropped because GRUB2 now supports the protocol, so booting stays compatible with the cleaner firmware behavior.
sdbootutil improved its systemd-boot handling with a new status command, parallel test execution, a --repair parameter for cleanup, and better reporting of entries with missing files. The update prevents duplicate entries on non-snapper systems, keeps the exit status of sdbootutil calls intact, and avoids writing the recovery PIN to the journal, which is a meaningful privacy improvement for systems using PCR-based secure boot.
GTK4 4.22.5 fixes a build failure on 32-bit ARM and repairs 32-bit Vulkan image builds, so the toolkit and gskvulkanimage both compile cleanly on armv7. A Wayland session crash in gdk_wayland_toplevel_remove_from_session() and a memory buffer fix round out the release for desktop users on ARM.
LLVM 23.1.1 arrives as a bugfix release for the 23.1.0 series, remaining API and ABI compatible while dropping the obsolete i586 build patch.
GIMP 3.2.6 carries the first AArch64-specific wins for the image editor. The clipboard brush and pattern maximum size is bumped to 8192 on AArch64 as well, matching the ceiling that x86-64 and PPC64 have had since the 3.2.0 release candidates, so larger brushes and patterns survive clipboard round-trips on ARM desktops.
shotwell 33.0 makes the jump from the 0.32 series with a full port to GTK4 (requiring at least 4.22), a reworked printing flow, and fixes for the fullscreen toolbar auto-hide and disappearing slideshow icons. The release replaces its dedicated authentication helper with a small localhost web server for publishing, adds a “peek password” toggle to the Piwigo flow and fixes setting desktop backgrounds.
kbd 2.10.0 extends the console stack with XKB support: loadkeys can now generate console keymaps from XKB data, import XKB compose tables and handle XKB group switching, modifier handling, virtual console switching and keypad/editing remaps.
Snapshots at a Glance
| Snapshot | Kernel | Headline changes |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-08 | 7.2.3 | glibc 2.44 with AArch64 GCS and SVE/AdvSIMD math, QEMU 11.1.1 with imx8mp-evk, Raspberry Pi firmware Wi-Fi scan fix |
| 2026-09-12 | 7.2.4 | edk2-stable202608 with AArch64 host tests, dracut aarch64 LED module, GTK4 32-bit ARM build fix, LLVM 23.1.1 |
| 2026-09-14 | 7.2.5 | kernel security batch (Tegra241 CMDQV, iommufd, nvmet, Bluetooth RFCOMM, PCI, rndis_host), GIMP 3.2.6 with AArch64 fixes, shotwell 33.0, kbd 2.10.0 |
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.
Tw Arm Update
author: Douglas DeMaio date: 2026-09-16 14:00:00+02:00 layout: post image: /wp-content/uploads/2025/07/sbc.png license: CC-BY-SA-3.0 title: Tumbleweed ARM Updates in September categories:
- Announcements
- openSUSE
- Tumbleweed
- Slowroll
- MicroOS
- arm tags:
- openSUSE
- Tumbleweed
- Developers
- sysadmin
- user
- Open Source
- rolling release
- gamers
- superuser
- distrowatch
- Linux
- kernel
- kernel-source
- Mesa
- graphics
- CVE
- Power Users
- Superuser
- ARM
- AArch64
- Raspberry Pi
- Rockchip
- SBC
- Jetson
- QEMU
- glibc
- UEFI
- snapper
- GIMP
- shotwell
- kbd
There were a few software package updates for openSUSE Tumbleweed ARM this month with snapshots reaching the ARM port.
September’s snapshots of the ARM port carried the Linux kernel to a security-heavy 7.2.5. There was a jump to glibc 2.44 with its large AArch64 push, and QEMU reaching 11.1.1. Raspberry Pi owners get a firmware fix that clears up a Wi-Fi scan error, the Networking Stack received security patches, and GIMP 3.2.6 brings AArch64-specific fixes.
Raspberry Pi
This month’s raspberrypi-firmware update prevents the spurious “-52” error message that could appear during Wi-Fi scans (bsc#1215134), so scanning for networks is quieter on boards where the firmware reported a phantom failure. The Linux kernel 7.2.4 update fixed a memory leak in the brcmfmac driver’s SDIO control path, which reduces memory pressure over long uptimes on the onboard Cypress Wi-Fi chip used across recent Pi models.
Rockchip & Other SBCs
Owners of Rockchip and other single-board computers get kernel fixes for the MediaTek Wi-Fi chipsets that many boards ship with, including headroom fixes for USB/SDIO transfers on mt7925 and EEPROM size validation on the mt7915 and mt7996 drivers, which protects against malformed device data (bsc#1012628). kernel-firmware-qcom adds DSP firmware for the Qualcomm x1e80100, nord and qcs8300 platforms, improving modem, DSP and graphics support. dracut now includes leds-qcom-lpg in the aarch64 DRM module set, keeping RGB indicator LEDs working when booting from an initrd. Finally, wireless-regdb enables 320 MHz channels for Hong Kong, updates South Africa’s rules, and drops the 60 GHz DFS flag for Togo.
i.MX & NXP
Developers working with NXP hardware gain the imx8mp-evk machine type in QEMU 11.1.1, which emulates the i.MX 8M Plus Evaluation Kit and makes it easier to test software for that platform without physical hardware. The kernel 7.2.3 update fixed the mxs-dcp crypto engine’s source scatterlist length access and improved the Data Co-Processor security block on i.MX System on Chips that use it for accelerated encryption. These changes make NXP hardware slightly more accessible to both emulation and crypto workloads.
aarch64 Virtualization, UEFI & Toolchain
QEMU 11.1.1 is the virtualization highlight of the month, advancing the emulator with Universal Flash Storage emulation for Write Booster and Host-Initiated Defragmentation based on the UFS 4.1 specification, plus vhost-host-user support for offloading real-time clock handling through virtio-rtc. The ARM targets gain new architectural CPU features, and the virt board can now specify cache topology. The ARM-specific fixes include a regression test and boundary-case fix for the SVE2 whilewr/whilerw instructions and a fix for arm_gicv3 kconfig selection, and openSUSE disables GCS linker validation in the spec to keep the aarch64 build working.
glibc 2.44 delivers the strongest AArch64 additions in months. On targets with the Guarded Control Stack extension, glibc now locks all GCS operations, including status, write-on-shadow-stack and push-to-shadow-stack, immediately after enabling GCS with an ENFORCED or OVERRIDE policy, closing a window where a process could still mutate its own shadow stack. Special-case paths for log, exp, sin, cas, sinh, cosh, asinh, acosh and atanh are vectorized for both SVE and AdvSIMD, and vector powr variants are added, which speeds up floating-point-heavy code on capable Cortex-X and Neoverse cores.
ovmf advances to edk2-stable202608, refreshing the UEFI firmware that backs the qemu-uefi-aarch64 subpackage. The update adds AArch64 host test coverage across SecurityPkg, CryptoPkg, PrmPkg, DynamicTablesPkg, MdeModulePkg and MdePkg, plus UnitTestFrameworkPkg support for GCC AArch64, which strengthens firmware quality assurance for arm64 virtual machines. The EFI Memory Attributes Protocol workaround is dropped because GRUB2 now supports the protocol, so booting stays compatible with the cleaner firmware behavior.
sdbootutil improved its systemd-boot handling with a new status command, parallel test execution, a --repair parameter for cleanup, and better reporting of entries with missing files. The update prevents duplicate entries on non-snapper systems, keeps the exit status of sdbootutil calls intact, and avoids writing the recovery PIN to the journal, which is a meaningful privacy improvement for systems using PCR-based secure boot.
GTK4 4.22.5 fixes a build failure on 32-bit ARM and repairs 32-bit Vulkan image builds, so the toolkit and gskvulkanimage both compile cleanly on armv7. A Wayland session crash in gdk_wayland_toplevel_remove_from_session() and a memory buffer fix round out the release for desktop users on ARM.
LLVM 23.1.1 arrives as a bugfix release for the 23.1.0 series, remaining API and ABI compatible while dropping the obsolete i586 build patch.
GIMP 3.2.6 carries the first AArch64-specific wins for the image editor. The clipboard brush and pattern maximum size is bumped to 8192 on AArch64 as well, matching the ceiling that x86-64 and PPC64 have had since the 3.2.0 release candidates, so larger brushes and patterns survive clipboard round-trips on ARM desktops.
shotwell 33.0 makes the jump from the 0.32 series with a full port to GTK4 (requiring at least 4.22), a reworked printing flow, and fixes for the fullscreen toolbar auto-hide and disappearing slideshow icons. The release replaces its dedicated authentication helper with a small localhost web server for publishing, adds a “peek password” toggle to the Piwigo flow and fixes setting desktop backgrounds.
kbd 2.10.0 extends the console stack with XKB support: loadkeys can now generate console keymaps from XKB data, import XKB compose tables and handle XKB group switching, modifier handling, virtual console switching and keypad/editing remaps.
Snapshots at a Glance
| Snapshot | Kernel | Headline changes |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-08 | 7.2.3 | glibc 2.44 with AArch64 GCS and SVE/AdvSIMD math, QEMU 11.1.1 with imx8mp-evk, Raspberry Pi firmware Wi-Fi scan fix |
| 2026-09-12 | 7.2.4 | edk2-stable202608 with AArch64 host tests, dracut aarch64 LED module, GTK4 32-bit ARM build fix, LLVM 23.1.1 |
| 2026-09-14 | 7.2.5 | kernel security batch (Tegra241 CMDQV, iommufd, nvmet, Bluetooth RFCOMM, PCI, rndis_host), GIMP 3.2.6 with AArch64 fixes, shotwell 33.0, kbd 2.10.0 |
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.
GNOME 51 Wallpapers
With GNOME 51 out the door, it's wallpaper reveal season again. This time around it's evolution, not revolution — the set sticks to its geometric roots.
The default is really just a stylistic touch up of the 50 hexagons. The subtle rim highlight received a spotlight and now shines extra bright.
I do keep hoping landscape nature photos eventually join the lineup, but capturing the same scenery under different conditions so the light and dark variants actually make sense is trickier than it sounds. That one's still on the wishlist.
As usual, plenty of concepts didn't make the cut. For every wallpaper that ships, there's a good pile of experiments that never got past the "that's kinda neat" stage.
One thing we keep struggling with is performance in the Appearance panel. The images now include an embedded small thumbnail, so hopefully a faster way to build the initial cache of thumbnails is on the horizon.
We've also started embedding attribution and license straight into the images themselves, so the credits travel with the file instead of living only in the repo. And with Loupe displaying the metadata nicely, you get to see it conveniently.
Syslog-ng repo for Amazon Linux 2023 updated to syslog-ng version 4.12
Two years ago, I created a syslog-ng repo for Amazon Linux 2023. As I received zero feedback, I left it alone until last week. The repo is now updated to the latest version of syslog-ng: 4.12.
According to Fedora Copr download stats, my Amazon Linux 2023 repo has many downloads. However, for over two years, I received zero feedback from the community, no matter how many GitHub, e-mail or social media posts I used to ask users about their experiences and requirements. As any kind of package maintenance needs some effort, I left the repo alone without updates.
Fast forward to last week: someone responded to my post on GitHub, asking for an update. So, once I got some idle time during a longer task, I updated the repo to syslog-ng version 4.12. During another break, I disabled Java support and slog, just as in any other repository we maintain.
As usual, you can find my Amazon Linux 2023 repo at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/czanik/syslog-ng-amazon23/ and share your feedback at https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/discussions/4965
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Originally published at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-repo-for-amazon-linux-2023-updated-to-syslog-ng-version-4-12