News archive for 2026

July - October 2026 Highlights

Author:	Nick Andrews
Date:	2026-10-27

The three months since the last news item have been the most active in the project's history, with almost 2500 commits landing in the development tree - more than in the whole preceding year. Much of it arrived through pull requests, which are now the normal way of contributing. Here are the major areas of work and the developers behind them.

Nick Andrews

• Added a brand new RISC-V port: riscv64 running on OpenSBI firmware (RVA22 profile), with trap handling, device tree parsing, Sv39 MMU, Zicbom cache operations, lazy FPU context switching, a device-tree PCI subsystem (with message interrupts and 64-bit windows), USB, NVMe, RTC, microsecond timer, self-resolving crash dumps and warm reboot, plus riscv support in the binutils and gcc patches. A bootable tree and distfiles are produced by the build.
• Finished the MuFS 2 port as a ROM-resident security.library, and built a multi-user system around it: Login/Logout/Passwd/Who/SetOwner, AMUInit and Security-Startup, a Zune login window with Shutdown/Reboot, per-user profile directories and assigns, permission enforcement in afs, ram, sfs and pfs3, pam.library pluggable authentication, hardware tokens (YubiKey plugin, FIDO U2F via a new fido.class and FidoTool), and a graphical Accounts program for managing users and groups.
• Added Envoy networking: envoy.library, nipc.library, services.library and accounts.library, the EFS client handler and filesystem service, and Services, FilesystemExports and FilesystemImports prefs.
• Added an experimental Bluetooth stack: bluetooth.library and btcore (L2CAP, RFCOMM, SDP client/server, GATT, SMP pairing) over BR/EDR and LE, HID over BR/EDR and HOGP (bthid.class), Serial Port Profile (btserial.class), PAN networking as SANA-II units (btpan.class), bonding persistence, reconnect policy, pluggable controller-firmware loaders and a Bluetooth prefs GUI.
• AROSTCP: IPv4 IGMP multicast, a 6in4 (SIT) tunnel pseudo-interface with Network prefs support, IPv4-mapped addresses, jumbo frames and runtime MTU changes, sockets shared with the C runtime through fd.library so read() and write() work on them, SMP locking throughout, IPv6 and per-interface DNS servers, a remote DoS fix in IP fragment reassembly, and a network services framework (netservices.library, services.d, a Services tab in Network prefs) under which sshd and the new timesyncd SNTP service run. Added the dwmac.device SANA-II driver and merged the rtl8168/8169 drivers.
• Graphics: modernised the Nouveau driver stack to Linux 6.18 drm/nouveau with GSP-RM 580.178.04 and Blackwell (GB20x) support, moved the VMware SVGA driver onto an in-process vmwgfx DRM port with 3D via Mesa's svga driver, moved display composition into gfx.hidd with composited layers, hardware planes, hardware video overlays and scan-out bitmaps, and added the efifbgfx and headlessgfx drivers. cybergraphics gained SSE2/AVX2 WritePixelArrayAlpha(), and screen user copper lists work again.
• Toolchain: updated the Mesa port to 26.2.5, forward-ported the LLVM patches to 23.1 (building the target-side LLVM from the monorepo), added a Rust cross compiler for AROS with a store of AROS-patched crates, updated the gcc 16 patch to 16.2.0 and grub2 to 2.16.
• Kernel and drivers: fixed dropped IOAPIC interrupts above GSI 15, 64-bit PCI BAR decoding and BAR mapping outside the identity window, added a PCI bus driver for Intel VMD, IPMI KCS/BT transports with a C:IPMI command, split HD Audio into a reusable controller class, unified the reboot/shutdown reset chain, and added ARDA, a read-only remote debug agent. A new controller.hidd provides a game controller input subsystem with USB, Bluetooth and XInput producers bridged to lowlevel.library.
• USB: hubss.class now talks the USB 3 hub protocol to SuperSpeed hubs, and pcixhci received use-after-free, teardown and enumeration fixes.
• C runtime: openat()/fdopendir()/fstatat() family, ftruncate64(), posix_fadvise(), fnmatch(), a thread-safe shared descriptor table, per-task runtime bases for pthread workers, one malloc pool per program, and C++ fixes (__dso_handle, usable pthread.h).
• Filesystems: afs gained run reads and multi-user permissions, fat maintains the clean-shutdown bit and honours DE_MAXTRANSFER, SFS received 64-bit startup fixes, and pfs3 was made 64-bit clean with a MultiUser variant.
• m68k: ROM-size work (size-optimised ROM code, moving code to the extended ROM bank, room for the compositor), the cd32mpeg.device build, and Paula interrupt fixes.
• Infrastructure: Windows-compatible filename validation in CI, documented contributing and pull request policies, fetch.sh hardening, Azure fixes, and refreshed translations.

Bo Ståle Kopperud

• Brought SMP to ARM and AArch64: exec spinlocks and barriers, an SMP-safe allocator, task state arbitration, secondary core bring-up on the Raspberry Pi, inter-processor interrupts (including GIC-400 on Pi 4/5), a per-core scheduler, CPU affinity (NP_Affinity, SetTaskAffinity(), inheritance), and an extensive SMP test suite covering scheduling, semaphores, timers, device I/O, networking and memory mapping.
• Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 on AArch64: the BCM2711 PCIe host bridge and DMA4 engines, the BCM2712 (Pi 5/500) bootstrap, GIC SPIs and MSI, RP1 xHCI and Ethernet presented as PCI devices, NVMe on the Pi 5, SD card and WiFi on BCM2712, power off, reboot and the power button, battclock with the Pi 5 and DS3231 RTCs, a bcmgenet Ethernet driver for the Pi 4, a cdnsgem (Cadence GEM) Ethernet driver for the Pi 5, and an i2c-bcm2708 driver.
• vcgfx (formerly vc4gfx): HVS display-list takeover with page flipping and overlay planes on every Pi, native HDMI mode setting from the sink's EDID on the Pi 4 and 5 (including scrambled modes above 340 MHz), and a set of display diagnostic tools (ddcprobe, dispdump, modetest).
• GPU: a vc4gallium VideoCore IV gallium driver and the v3d (VideoCore VI) driver rebuilt on it and ported to Mesa 26, giving OpenGL on the Pi 3 and 4 with a GL session per screen.
• Reworked usb2otg (DWC2) split transfers and hotplug handling, raised lan78xx throughput from 100 to 780 KB/s, and made SD I/O faster while fixing lost sectors on the Pi 1-3.
• WiFi: a C:wifi command and a WiFi network chooser prefs program, bwfm signal quality and traffic reporting, and AROSTCP DHCP restarts when links come and go. Also fixed AROSTCP descriptor handling and socket hand-over under SMP.
• Added the flexgroup layout engine to Zune, fixed three Zune attribute bugs, added pread() and CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID to posixc, fixed several pthread races, and gave Intuition per-screen mouse coordinates for scaling display drivers.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz

• Rebuilt the Nouveau graphics driver on top of the drm/nouveau code from the Linux kernel, with a Linux compatibility layer derived from FreeBSD, libdrm 2.4.101 and xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.16. The result boots and switches resolution on cards from Tesla through Maxwell (tested on GF8500 GT, GT240, GTX 550 Ti, GT 630, GTX 750 and GTX 760), with 2D acceleration on Tesla, Fermi, Kepler and Maxwell, 3D through gallium, firmware loading and DVI/DisplayPort connector support.
• xHCI fixes: full endpoint recovery from STALL, support for more than 15 root hub ports, and a LynxPoint chipset quirk.

Andreas W. Just

• Documented hundreds of previously undocumented APIs in AutoDocs: stdc and posixc (math, fenv, locale, complex), pthread, poseidon.library, the kernel's Krn* calls, Bluetooth, decorator and popupmenu libraries, nvdisk, usergroup, rexxsyslib and many more.
• Shell and console: error output redirection, the pipe character enabled by default, backtick and .key/.def fixes, control-key line editing and Ctrl-W in console.handler, native Iconify for console windows, and a long run of console.device CSI fixes (ICH/DCH counts, per-unit keymaps, the BEL beep).
• Made the C: commands preserve failure status consistently, fixed Version, hardened Snoopy, tools/package and Unpack, and expanded ShowConfig with storage, memory, system identity, CPU feature and release-date reporting.
• Added a native QRCode.mcc Zune class, Gorilla icons for the prefs programs, window sizing and iconify in MultiView, ShowWindow()/HideWindow() semantics in Intuition, SSD classification in ahci/ata and an exact capacity method in storage.hidd.
• Build system: dynamic buffers in MetaMake and genmodule, response files to avoid ARG_MAX in link commands, and LF line-ending normalisation with a CI report.

Gareth Davidson

• Made PFS3 metadata endian-independent so the handler works on native little-endian targets, then performed a thorough robustness pass over it: cache eviction, failed-write retention, bounds checks and error reporting.
• Carried out similar hardening passes over FAT, NTFS, AFS, SFS and SFSDefrag, smbfs (SMB1 framing, NTLM, bounds), CDVDFS/CDFS (ISO, Rock Ridge, Joliet and HFS), and the RAM, PIPE, CON, port and debug handlers.
• Ported narrator-ts to AROS, adding SPEAK: and a modern speech API.
• Fixed classic Amiga live-media booting (bootstrap path, inputclass in the bootstrap ELF, CD boot detection by filesystem type), FAT detection on GPT basic data partitions, several BOOPSI gadget classes (colorwheel, gradientslider, tapedeck) and X11 keyboard autorepeat handling.

Nicolas Ramz

• CD32: added CD32 MPEG device support, fixed CDXL playback (Microcosm), audio playback, delayed media insertion and Akiko read streams, and fixed Kid Chaos compatibility and pad sampling.
• Cut the m68k memory footprint: right-sized stacks and buffers, on-demand Intuition pools, geometric exec pool growth, a sparse exception-handler list, low-memory preservation for hunks and packets, and a ROM-safe RAM drive.
• Classic graphics compatibility: caller-owned Chip RAM planar screens and raw custom screens display on AmigaVideo, blitter-accelerated planar blits, masked copies and template blits, user copper lists, classic sprite streams and legacy cursors, beam-synchronised blits and D/Generation compatibility.
• dos: honoured legacy BCPL packet callbacks, ran the CD boot shell in the boot process, moved large FRead()/FWrite() requests without the buffer, laid out CIABase like Kickstart, and preserved interrupt nesting and CCR across m68k task exceptions.

Fabian Schmieder

• Laid the groundwork for Raspberry Pi 5 support: an experimental BCM2712 platform, the RP1 southbridge resource with DesignWare I2C and xHCI USB 3.0, a PCIe host bridge for M.2 NVMe HATs, eMMC2 and DMA, CYW43455 WiFi, the hardware RTC via the VideoCore mailbox, an upgraded gpio.resource with a C:GPIO command, HDMI audio and an I2S audio driver for DAC HATs.
• Added the initial VideoCore VI (V3D 4.2) GPU driver with Mesa OpenGL, and a modular AArch64 startup with dual exception stacks.
• Added m68kemu.library, an m68k emulation library built on the Moira CPU core, with a RunM68K tool and dos routing of m68k hunk binaries through it.
• Ported mbedTLS 3.6.7 and libssh, and added native ssh, sshd and keygen.
• Added a native Cocoa display backend and input HIDD for Apple Silicon.

Jaime Dias

• Networked MIDI: CAMD drivers for MIDI over the network, an RTP-MIDI link library with AppleMIDI sessions and clock sync, Universal MIDI Packet and Network MIDI 2.0 support, and the netmidid service with mDNS advertising.
• Added mdnsd and bonami.library for multicast DNS service registration, DNS-SD browse and resolve, record queries and command-line tools.
• Bluetooth: a BLE MIDI class, the Raspberry Pi onboard Bluetooth transport, LE peripheral and GATT support, and Pi 400/CM4 firmware.
• Made USB MIDI devices usable through CAMD, fixed CAMD driver scanning and port lifetime, and added IPv4 multicast on SANA-II interfaces to AROSTCP.

Bernie Innocenti

• A sweep of graphics.library, amigavideo and p96gfx correctness fixes: plane masks and rp->Mask honoured everywhere, minterms applied over pens, RectFill drawmodes, FRST_DOT, BltPattern masks, the blitter's Bresenham tie-break, BitMapScale() sampling, and P96 pointer sprite handling.
• Added an AUX: handler, a Paula serial hidd for m68k-amiga, con-handler over a device, Mount SHUTDOWN and proper error reporting from Mount, Assign and the Shell.
• Added a ZZ9000 Picasso96 display driver loader, made the classic preferences the default on m68k Amiga, and fitted the ScreenMode editor on 200-line screens.

John Knipper

• Brought up the Raspberry Pi 4 (BCM2711) on AArch64: GIC-400 and generic timer platform, device tree parsing, interrupt routing and the SDHCI card slot, along with pcixhci fixes for strict-alignment and cache-coherency on AArch64.
• dos: implemented SYS_CliNumPtr, fixed Rename(), multi-assign opens and NameFromLock(); added ACTION_FLUSH to fat and afs, and fixed AROSTCP SocketBase publication and locking.

Espen Otterstad

• Made the darwin-aarch64 hosted port usable: built the Cocoa display backend on the split gfx/display classes, fixed the mouse and keyboard drivers and key mapping, variadic host calls on arm64, W^X executable code hunks, hostdisk on arm64 and interrupt masking.
• Fixed ram-handler soft links and name limits, pfs3 ownership and name overflows, and aarch64 relocation range checks in the ELF loader.

Andrew Hutchings

• CD32 booting: cd.device fixes for Akiko's latched completion bits, drive waits, CD_PLAYTRACK and disc probing; CD boots run as an appliance with requesters suppressed; and m68k memory reductions (measured task stacks, pools no longer committing a full puddle, a CDVDFS cache a stock CD32 can afford).

terminills

• x86_64: expanded the identity map and page tables from 4 GiB to 64 GiB, a GOP framebuffer handoff for framebuffers above 4 GiB (ReBAR), and SMP multi-core bring-up with an interrupt-controller rework.
• Imported Mesa 26.0.0, and added an amdgpu driver derived from Linux amdgpu with RadeonSI (SI and CIK), GPU 2D operations and an AMDGPU monitor.
• A large Installer compatibility pass: copyfiles, copylib, foreach, getsum, getversion, patmatch, protect, textfile, tooltype and the askdir/askfile/ askdisk GUI, many Installer V43 behaviour fixes, APPBANNER and DRYRUN.
• Added a Bluetooth A2DP audio class, fixed bluetooth.class USB handling, CD automounts in massstorage.class, RNDIS binding and i8042 initialisation.

Andrzej "retrofaza" Subocz

• Overhauled BoingIconBar (ALIGN tooltype, alpha transparency, custom labels, surviving screen resets, refresh and crash fixes), fixed Dtpic alpha rendering, made MUI settings apply live, and fixed NListtree heap corruption and corrupted prefs handling in Dataspace.

Also deserving mention: Ashahell added getrusage() and sysconf() support to posixc, made x86_64 KrnMapGlobal page-granular with cross-CPU TLB flushes and made the AHI drivers report their mixing rates; Tomasz Staniak moved gfx.hidd composition off screen so an undrawn buffer is never shown and added input shapes to layers; Toni Wilen fixed ROM detection, moved modules to the extended ROM and added new-style UAE boot ROM RTG support; tonimanot71 contributed a batch of Kickstart-compatibility fixes for trackdisk, dosboot, the Shell and graphics; Rob N added dosrelative.library for directory-relative file operations; Bryan Ashby fixed AFS bitmap validation; and Vaibhav Srivastava fixed documentation typos.

July 2025 - July 2026 Highlights

Author:	Nick Andrews
Date:	2026-07-29

The past year has been one of the busiest in recent memory for AROS, with almost 2000 commits landing in the development tree. Rather than list every change, here are the major areas of work and the developers behind them.

Nick Andrews

• Networking: gave AROSTCP full IPv6 support (Neighbour Discovery, SLAAC, privacy addresses, dual-stack TCP6/UDP6, multicast), and modernized the TCP code with SACK/ECN, pluggable congestion control (including CUBIC), SYN cookies and ISN randomization.
• Added a new Roadshow-compatible firewall (ipf/ipnat) with a brand new Firewall prefs GUI, and reworked the Network prefs GUI with per-interface IPv4/IPv6 configuration.
• Updated the DHCP client (with DHCPv6 and zeroconf support), and added or rewrote the route, nslookup, ip, netstat, traceroute and usergroup.library userland components, along with a systematic memory-safety and security hardening pass across the whole stack.
• Implemented xHCI (USB 3.x) support, first inside pciusb.device and then as a standalone driver, bringing SuperSpeed device and hub support, USB3 streams, and UAS (USB Attached SCSI) mass storage.
• Overhauled the isochronous transfer paths across all four USB host controller drivers (UHCI/OHCI/EHCI/xHCI), fixed 64-bit DMA handling throughout, extended the Poseidon APIs for the new hardware, and added a CDC Ethernet class.
• Made AROS buildable with the LLVM/Clang toolchain (patches for LLVM/Clang 20, libc++, compiler-rt and friends), and kept GCC support current through GCC 15 and 16, with binutils updated to 2.45/2.47.
• Continued C runtime conformance work: wide-character, multibyte and locale support, the sigaction() family, strftime() completion, and many robustness fixes, all backed by new CUnit test coverage. Added a cryptographic RNG backed by entropy.resource, and dos64.library for 64-bit file I/O.
• x86_64 kernel: added a symbol resolver with backtrace support and better crash diagnostics, fixed boot failures on Ryzen CPUs, added MSI-X support, and reworked shutdown handling to fix reboots on native hardware.
• Added an ACPI telemetry framework exposing thermal zones, fans, power meters and batteries in SysExplorer, an IPMI hidd, and a CPU frequency governor with AMD P-state support. The NVMe driver gained scatter/gather support and the NTFS handler was hardened.
• Reworked the input subsystem around a new common inputclass hidd.
• Graphics and media: began refactoring the gfx HIDD architecture, implemented blur/tint/setalpha ProcessPixelArray operations with SSE-optimized versions, and reworked Decoration theming into a layered, multi-instance architecture.
• Added jpegxl and font datatypes, AVIF support and much improved TIFF handling. AHI received SSE/AVX-optimized mixing routines and AHIRecord was integrated (kindly donated by its author, Thomas Wenzel).
• Started an initial ClassAct/ReAction compatibility layer, and switched boot ISOs to grub-mkrescue so they boot on both BIOS and EFI systems.
• Migrated and reworked the Azure nightly build pipelines, added nightly unit-test and localization report pages, and updated the bundled third-party libraries (freetype2, libpng, libtiff, expat, xz, zstd, ICU, ACPICA, etc.).

Krzysztof Smiechowicz

• Brought the Nouveau and IntelGMA graphics drivers back into the standard build.
• Fixed many issues in the VMware SVGA driver (resolution switching via ModeID, cursor handling under QEMU, compositor support).
• Contributed xHCI fixes verified on real hardware, including Intel EHCI/xHCI shared-port routing.
• Fixed a rare x86_64 kernel crash in interrupt dispatch along with XMM state alignment issues.
• Updated OpenURL to 7.18, fixed memory allocator edge cases, and kept Zune binary compatibility intact while fixing prefs regressions.

Bo Ståle Kopperud

• Delivered a new 64-bit AArch64 Raspberry Pi port.
• Added new Raspberry Pi drivers: the BCM2835 SDHOST controller, HDMI and PWM (headphone jack) AHI audio drivers, a Broadcom WiFi (bwfm) SANA-II device with supporting sdio and dma resources, and a lan78xx USB Ethernet class for the Pi 3B+.
• Gave the vc4gfx VideoCore driver DMA/NEON 2D acceleration, a hardware cursor and multi-mode HDMI support, and substantially hardened the usb2otg (DWC2) USB driver.
• Enabled ARM and AArch64 builds with the LLVM/Clang toolchain, and fixed ARM relocation handling in binutils and the ELF loader.
• Added the Zune Panel/PanelGroup classes and rounded frame support, and fixed several FAT filesystem bugs.

Nicolas Ramz

• Focused on classic Amiga (m68k) performance: reduced interrupt, timer and scheduler latency, blitter-accelerated rendering (text output, area fills, MFM sector decoding, the boot animation), and faster task switching and ROM scanning.
• Many console and Shell fixes improving compatibility with classic applications, including Workbench 1.3 BCPL console support.
• Workbook received progressive icon loading and numerous layout and refresh fixes, and Intuition gained optimized gadget refreshes and a distinct built-in busy pointer.

Johan Gill

• Completed missing rexxsyslib functions so HippoPlayer's ARexx support now works.
• Implemented ChangeSprite() and GetExtSpriteA() and fixed Amiga chipset copper handling.
• Made intmax_t 64-bit, unified memory pool alignment with AmigaOS, and repaired task scheduling for 32-bit AROS hosted on ARM Linux.

John Knipper

• Added a hosted AROS target for Apple Silicon Macs (darwin-aarch64), including the AArch64 CPU support layer.
• Made console.device input handling asynchronous (fixing a window-resize deadlock) and fixed escape sequences split across writes.
• Implemented file notifications in emul-handler, and contributed many 64-bit correctness fixes.

Neil Cafferkey

• Fixed 64-bit issues in several network drivers - nvidianet.device now works on x86-64 and etherlink3.device was fixed and improved.
• Upgraded the Atheros wireless HAL to NetBSD 10.1, fixed the realtek8180 wireless driver and WirelessManager, and fixed Ctrl-Alt-Del system reset.

Bernie Innocenti

• Added battmem.resource and battery-backed clock memory support for m68k-amiga.
• Made Picasso96 card drivers load from DEVS:Monitors, added entering the boot menu via the HELP key, and fixed an AGA palette crash.

Fabian Schmieder

• Contributed a wave of security and stability fixes: an AFS path-parsing buffer overflow, an icon ARGB decompression overflow, TLSF double-free detection, AArch64 va_list support in exec, and SMP locking fixes.

Also deserving mention: Dimitris Panokostas performed a security sweep of the Poseidon USB stack; Stephen Bancroft added VirtIO support and fixed Wanderer resource leaks; Gareth Davidson fixed the serial device and i386-pc boot ISO builds; Andrew Hutchings fixed early input event loss and booting with NTSC-only display databases; Andrzej "retrofaza" Subocz fixed crashes and scrolling bugs in Edit and text.datatype; Matthias Rustler fixed SysMon and CRT temporary-file handling; and Alain Greppin improved the cmake build integration.