Arm64 platform direction dominated this week: Will Deacon posted v2 of the series that removes big-endian kernel support, aimed at Linux 7.4, and a new 19-patch series that brings parallel secondary CPU onlining to arm64 through the PSCI v0.2 CPU_ON argument. Alongside those, Linux 7.3-rc2 arrived unusually large with scheduler fixes among the corrections, Buildroot 2026.08 shipped with GCC 16 and glibc 2.44 support, and kernel.org published measurements showing AI crawlers consume about a fifth of its git infrastructure capacity.
The theme this week is direction-setting on arm64. Two of the five items come from the arm64 maintainer's own queue, posted on the same day, and both change what the platform will look like for the next decade: one removes a capability, the other modernises how arm64 machines with PSCI firmware boot. The remaining items cover the 7.3 stabilisation cycle, the embedded build-system cadence, and the infrastructure your git workflows depend on.
In this edition
Arm64 big-endian removal queued for Linux 7.4. Will Deacon's 14-patch v2 deletes the remaining big-endian kernel code; four maintainer acks are already in. — planning signal
Parallel CPU onlining through PSCI proposed for arm64. A 19-patch series wires arm64 into the generic HOTPLUG_PARALLEL machinery, with measured bringup-time cuts of 41 to 65 percent on the predecessor series. — long-term watch
