News archive for 2026

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.