openEuler New Releases Come With a Heavy Dose of AI and Agents

openEuler has two fresh releases out. 24.03 LTS SP4 arrived in July 2026, and the short-term 26.09 innovation release followed on October 1.

We covered openEuler 24.03 LTS when it came out in 2024. Two years later, that LTS version is still getting new features, and SP4 is the latest round.

The releases have plenty of features of all kinds. Some target SuperPoD infrastructure and specialized AI accelerators, you know, enterprise features. So this article focuses on the features you and I can explore on a regular PC or virtual machine.

I am going to check on the AI tools, the desktop bits and the under-the-hood changes. I installed them in GNOME Boxes to see what actually works on a regular machine.

LTS, service packs and innovation releases

openEuler has two release tracks: long-term support (LTS) and innovation releases. The community is continuing to develop the 24.03 LTS series through service packs, with the next major LTS release currently expected in 2028.

Instead of new version numbers, an LTS gets feature updates through service packs (SP1, SP2 and so on). Unlike Windows service packs (if you remember it), these are proper feature releases, not just a bundle of patches.

Similar to Ubuntu's six monthly releases, these "Innovation releases" introduce newer technologies on a shorter support cycle. openEuler 26.09 is scheduled to receive support until March 2027.

What's new in openEuler 24.03 LTS SP4

SP4 stays on Linux kernel 6.6, but openEuler keeps backporting newer upstream features into it.

AI-assisted diagnosis and tuning

The AI addition most relevant to regular users is intelligent diagnosis and tuning. An Intelligent Diagnosis Agent works with a Known Issue Analysis Agent to find a problem, work out the root cause and suggest a fix.

The tuning side collects system metrics, finds performance bottlenecks and gives you optimization suggestions. In theory, that saves you hours of staring at top and perf output.

The AI features are delivered through openEuler's Witty framework, which can be installed from the distribution repositories using the package witty. Once installed, you launch the interface with witty or opencode and interact with the diagnosis and tuning agents through natural language prompts.

Unlike the first-generation EulerCopilot experience, which was closely tied to openEuler's own cloud AI services, Witty supports both local models and a range of OpenAI-compatible APIs, making deployment significantly more flexible for users outside China.

There's also a lightweight Agent sandbox for running code and tool calls from AI agents in isolation. Considering how many people now give AI agents shell access, that's a sensible addition.

Kernel changes worth knowing

Under the hood changes that you won't see.

The biggest addition is sched_ext, the eBPF-based scheduler framework that landed upstream in Linux 6.12. You can load custom CPU schedulers at runtime without recompiling the kernel. If one misbehaves, the kernel quietly falls back to the default scheduler.

FUSE file systems can now talk to the kernel over io_uring. That should help performance for FUSE-based tools like sshfs.

There's also a programmable page cache that lets applications set their own file caching policy. It's meant to speed up loading large AI models, which is usually limited by disk I/O.

ARM users can now choose a 64K page-size kernel at install time. The 4K kernel stays the default, so nothing changes unless you opt in.

The enterprise stuff

The rest of SP4 is aimed at enterprises and data centers. There's NPU compute slicing, faster recovery for AI inference containers, networking and reliability features for SuperPoD, and confidential computing improvements for Arm CCA, TaiShan and Hygon systems. openEuler's own compiler builds (LLVM, Go and BiSheng JDK) also got updates.

What's new in openEuler 26.09

26.09 ships with two kernels: Linux 6.6 for servers and Linux 6.18 for DevStation, openEuler's developer desktop edition.

OpenEuler 26.09 server edition

DevStation is where most of the desktop-relevant changes are and that's what I tried in the VM.

A new installer and a user-space package manager

DevStation uses a new installer called "heolleo". I almost read that as "Hello Leo" 😄

It uses a SquashFS-based image, can install from a local ISO and works fully offline.

Heolleo Installer

The more interesting addition is epkg, a user-space package manager. It installs software in your home directory without touching system packages, and you can keep separate environments for different projects. It supports multiple package sources too, which makes it sound a bit like Conda or Nix.

PolyMind: a self-hosted AI agent platform

DevStation also bundles PolyMind, a self-hosted platform for AI chat, agent workflows and managing multiple models. It connects to MCP services and AI agents through its agentd service.

OpenEuler Polymind

SkillHub and keeping agents in check

openEuler also launched SkillHub, a place to find, install and share AI agent skills. Each skill gets an automated security assessment. openEuler is upfront that this helps you judge risk but doesn't guarantee a skill is safe, which is a fair warning.

OpenEuler SkillHub

AgentCensor is the one I find most interesting and useful going by its description. It sits between an AI agent and your system, logs tool calls, file changes and system calls, and can allow, block or ask for your approval before the agent runs something.

SCCS tackles token bloat in long-running agents. It replaces large tool outputs in the context window with short references and fetches the full content only when needed. The rest (ram-a-kv, MemFabric and ModelFS) are for optimizing inference servers.

ModelFS is a model startup acceleration feature that uses a programmable page-cache framework underneath, allowing caching behaviour to be tuned for AI workloads while remaining compatible with existing applications.

Getting openEuler

You can get both from the official download page. There are several choices, from servers to embed devices. For normal usage, go for the DevStation. That's the desktop version and that's the one that comes with all the above mentioned AI tools.

Download openEuler

Things have certainly improved in the past two years since we last covered openEuler first. The focus is on providing AI and that's not surprising. We are in 2026 and AI is everywhere. An operating system focused on developers has to provide AI at its core.

Have you tried openEuler ever? What's your experience with it like? Share in the comments please.

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Is Ubuntu Eyeing Immutability? Canonical Restarts Core Desktop and Eyes a Firmware Change for LTS

Canonical has restarted development of Ubuntu Core Desktop, an immutable, snap-based take on Ubuntu that sat dormant after a developer preview in 2023. Jon Seager, Canonical's VP Engineering for Ubuntu, says a dedicated team is now working on it.

The objective is for it to grow into the default Ubuntu desktop experience as the project matures. What you know of Ubuntu Desktop is not changing, and Jon says that the various Ubuntu flavors are under no pressure to build Core versions of their own.

Separately, Juerg Haefliger, a Canonical engineer, has proposed a firmware package for Ubuntu LTS releases that would shield older kernels from firmware written for newer ones.

Both are early in development and things could still change.

What's Ubuntu Core Desktop?

Ubuntu Core is Canonical's operating system for IoT and embedded devices, and work on it started in 2014. It is immutable and strictly confined, with the kernel, OS image, and apps being kept separate and updated independently of each other.

On Core Desktop, everything is a Snap, from the bootloader and kernel to the desktop environment and your apps. That makes the system harder to break and easier to recover.

The 2023 desktop preview fell short of expectations because it packed much of the desktop, including GNOME and its login screen, into one bulky Snap package. The new approach is to get those pieces separated.

A newly-assigned team of developers has already made good progress moving the old preview onto the newer Core 26 base. Infrastructure for daily image builds is expected to be ready within the coming weeks, and the work is set to run through the 27.04 cycle.

Apps are a big hurdle since Core Desktop only runs strictly confined Snaps, and classic ones like VS Code can't run on it directly. Jon's preferred idea is to host them in a Workshop, Canonical's sandboxed development environment, and show their windows on the main desktop.

Permissions prompting is another piece he considers key to Core's success. Under this, the system would ask users before a confined app touches things like the camera, microphone, or home directory.

What's the firmware proposal about?

Ubuntu LTS releases launch with one kernel, known as GA, and the hardware enablement (HWE) stack later rolls out newer kernels for that same release. Ubuntu 24.04 launched on kernel 6.8, and its current HWE kernel is 7.0.

Desktop installs of 24.04 follow HWE by default, while servers stay on GA unless you opt in. Both kernels share one firmware package today, so firmware backported for the newer kernel also lands on GA systems, and Juerg notes that vendors rarely test an old kernel with new firmware.

He points to a couple of AMD regressions on GA systems after recent 24.04 backports. His solution to the problem is a linux-firmware-hwe package that HWE kernels would depend on.

It would carry the complete firmware set from the Ubuntu release the HWE kernel comes from, in place of a handful of hand-picked files backported to the LTS.

GA systems would stay on the regular firmware, and the two sets can't be installed together. A machine with both kernels would load the HWE firmware even when booting GA, and the bug report for this change has left the workaround as something that might be considered.

As for when this might land, the report is still quite new, with no assignee mentioned and a test case section that only says TBD. Though it is being tracked against Ubuntu 27.04, which is set for an April release next year, codenamed "Tenacious T-Rex."

Neither change affects a regular Ubuntu user yet, and once the daily Core Desktop images start showing up, we shall see how far the project can go in its quest for immutability.

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Jadens JD-166 Review: Portable, Inkless Thermal Printer on Linux

For Linux veterans, printers can induce nightmares. Although, lately, printer support has vastly improved on Linux, at least for the newer models.

Last week, I got my hands on Jadens JD-166, which is very different from all the printers I have used so far.

It's a tiny device, almost a foot wide and only an inch tall and yet you can use A4 papers with it. There is no concept of ink here as it is a 'thermal printer'.

Think of the last time you needed a printed agreement or a form while traveling, and had to hunt for a print shop. This is the problem the JD-166 is trying to solve. The tiny form factor means that you can carry this printer with you easily.

It does that document printing job well enough, but there are trade-offs you should know about before buying one.

✅ Truly portable, prints full A4 pages without ink or toner
✅ Works over USB on Ubuntu once the right driver is installed
❎ Black and white only, no duplex, and needs special thermal paper
❎ Linux driver is only available as a .deb file

📋

Jadens sent me this printer for testing on Linux. Views expressed are my own, based on my experience.

The hardware

Here is what I know about the JD-166. I have left placeholders for the details I still need to confirm.

Spec	Details
Type	Thermal printer, no ink or toner
Paper size	A4 (also supports Letter-ish sizes in the driver)
Resolution	203 dpi (as listed in the Linux driver)
Color	Black and white only
Duplex	No
Connectivity (computer)	USB
Connectivity (phone)	Bluetooth (BLE), through the Jadens app
Weight and dimensions	~445 grams and 250x32x55 mm
Supported file formats	Word/Excel/PDF/TXT
Power / battery	1800mAh, charges via USB C port

Pricing starts at US $60 and the printer comes with 10 sheets of A4 thermal paper. That's important, and I explain it in the next sections.

What is a thermal printer?

A thermal printer does not use ink or toner. It heats the paper itself, which is coated to darken where the printhead touches it. That is why the JD-166 is small, and also why it prints only in black and white.

Text and simple graphics are fine. Photos get reduced to black and white, so do not expect anything close to a photo printer. You stick to document printing and that's what the Jadens also indicates in the official file format support.

You do save on ink, but you spend that money on paper instead. Jadens recommends its own special thermal paper, which has a cut at the top and a black mark on the back.

Since the paper is thermal, double-sided printing is out of the question. You get one side per sheet.

From what I see on Amazon, 200 sheets of Jaden A4 thermal printer cost $20. Which comes to 10 cents a paper. So the pricing is pretty much in the same range as a regular inkjet printer.

But the advantage here is the protability.

Portability is the whole point

For regular home use, a regular laser printer is more suitable, as you can print in color, utilize both sides of the paper, and won't have to hunt for a special kind of paper.

The advantage of JD166 is that it is small and you can take it with you. If you travel often and need to print documents for an agreement, forms or anything else that needs paper, you do not have to look for a printing shop. You plug it into your laptop (or connect your phone) and print.

If you only print a handful of pages a month while traveling, this makes more sense and could actually save you money and time.

Setting it up on Ubuntu

I plugged the printer into Ubuntu 26.04 over USB and turned it on. CUPS recognized it immediately. The printer showed up in the settings right away, which made me think everything was working.

It was not. CUPS had picked the HP Designjet T920 PostScript driver for it, which is a large-format plotter driver. Print jobs went into the queue, showed "Processing", and never finished. The status stayed stuck on a ppdFilterEmitJCL message in the CUPS logs.

To rule out the driver, I switched the queue to a raw queue and sent a few test files in different printer languages like ESC/POS, TSPL and ZPL etc. The jobs "completed" in CUPS, but nothing came out of the printer. CUPS marking a job as completed only means the data reached the printer. It does not mean the printer understood it.

Well, that was the indication that the generic CUPS is not going to work. Thankfully, Jadens provides drivers for Linux, or should I say Debian? Because there is only .deb file to download.

I installed it, unplugged the printer, and plugged it back in. The Jadens printer was recognized properly. After that, the printer worked and printed pages correctly. No issues at all.

Jadens printer correctly recognized after driver was installed

Print settings available in Ubuntu

The driver exposes a decent set of options through CUPS. You can check them with:

lpoptions -p JD-166 -l | grep -E '^(PageSize|Resolution|Darkness|ColorModel)'

The ones that matter most are page size (A4 is w595h841), Darkness (0 to 4, default 2), Color Model (Gray or RGB), and a few image options like Threshold and Contrast.

You can set defaults like this:

sudo lpadmin -p JD-166 -o PageSize=w595h841 -o Darkness=3

You don't necessarily need to do this. You can also change the settings when you select something to print. Setting the defaults saves the trouble of changing the settings each time.

The mobile app has more configuration options for things like darkness and quality. I am not sure how many of them map to options in Ubuntu's printer settings.

Print speed

For some reasons, LibreOffice kept on printing the document in landscape mode, no matter how many settings tweaks I did. ONLYOFFICE was better as it printed in portrait mode.

Here's a demo of a single sheet print and you can see the printing speed for yourself and judge if it's good enough for a handy, portable printer or not.

📋

I also used Jadens app on my Samsung smartphone. Connected over Bluetooth, it printed documents without trouble.

Is it worth getting the Jadens JD-166?

If you want color, double-sided printing or fast, cheap pages for everyday use, this is not the printer for you. If you travel often and need to print the odd document without hunting for a print shop, the JD-166 could be worth considering for emergency printing. This could also be a good gift idea.

It is small, it prints full A4 pages, and once the driver is installed, it works well on Ubuntu and probably other Debian-based distributions. Since the printer has battery, no need to attach the USB cable all the time.

Jadens JD166 is available on Amazon US and other countries. Pricing starts around US $60. You can also order it from their official website, although a regular e-commerce store like Amazon would be more convenient.

Get Jadens JD166 Thermal Printer on Amazon

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Local AI Weekly #7: Bubble or Not?

The Reuters proclaimed that the AI bubble has already burst in China. Chinese AI and chip stocks have lost about $480 billion in value. In the West, Amazon has put most of its Nova models on "keep the lights on" mode.

And yet, chip maker SK Hynix posted record profits of $29.7 billion in Q3. Their CEO says the memory shortage runs till 2030. So the bubble is popping for some, but not for the folks selling you RAM. Looks like we have to wait some more for the prices to come down for our homelab expansion.

This edition of Local AI Weekly is supported by PikaPods. You can self-host open source software in under a minute with PikaPods. New users get $5 free credit to try it out.

🔎 Discover AI tools

LokalBot records and transcribes meetings on your computer. No bot joins the call hete and you also get dictation and search, all with local models through llama.cpp on Vulkan or the CPU.

OpenNoteTaker does the same job inside a browser tab. Whisper runs as WebAssembly and your audio is never uploaded. Recording, transcripts and exports are free, no account needed. However, the AI-written minutes and translation are paid extras, though, and they send text to the developer's backend. It's Chrome and Edge only for now.

Subtitld 26.10 is the biggest release yet of this GPL-3.0 subtitle editor. You can go from raw video to timed, translated and dubbed subtitles in one window. It uses whisper.cpp or Vosk for speech, and Piper, Kokoro and others for voices. Many of these run fully offline.

🤖 The agents keep shipping

Gregory Kurtzer, the man behind CentOS and Rocky Linux, built Ginux in 11 days. It's a new kernel written mostly in Rust, and it's not Linux.

A Codex agent wrote about 139,000 lines while Kurtzer set the architecture and checked the work. The "G" stands for GPT, by the way, not GNU. Consider it as a research prototype.

Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke launched Entire, a Git forge for humans and agents working together. The pull requests become "Trails" here with eval scores that agents update on every push. The memory plugins are open source and local-first. The forge itself is hosted, so don't expect to self-host it.

🗞️ Open model news

Twitter's original founder, Jack Dorsey's Block showed off Dessa, a speech model that listens and talks at the same time. It was trained only on human speech, whereas most AI models are trained on text. Block says it runs on a MacBook Pro with M4 Max or better. There's no word on weights or a license yet, just a waitlist.

Mistral Large 4 is due on 31 October. Just in time for Halloween.

👀 Big Tech watch

China's STAR 50 index of AI and chip stocks fell 40% in under four months, as per Reuters. GPU makers MetaX and Moore Threads have each lost about half their value since July. Traders blame sky-high valuations and the threat of bans on Chinese systems in foreign data centers.

Amazon has moved most Nova models to "keep the lights on" mode, as Futurism reported. The money now goes into one frontier model.

SK Hynix posted record numbers: 83.3 trillion won (South Korean currency) in operating profit on 104.6 trillion won revenue. That's an 80% margin. The company expects demand to beat supply through 2030, and big contracts already cover more than half its 2027 and 2028 output. Consumer RAM gets whatever is left, so don't wait for cheap DDR5 😭

🗂 AI jargon: Open weights

You would have come across this term multiple times in this newlsetter itself. Open weights means the trained model file is public. You can download it and run it on your own hardware. That doesn't automatically make it open source. The training data and code usually stay private, and the license decides what you're allowed to do with it.

However, the good thing is that once the weights are on your disk, no company can "retire" them on you.

😆 Meme

⚡ Quick tip: Back up the models you rely on

If you use Ollama for local AI, run ollama list to see your models and their IDs. You can then copy the models folder to your backup drive for safekeeping. It's usually ~/.ollama/models for a user install, or /usr/share/ollama/.ollama/models if Ollama runs as a system service.

Keep exploring AI locally. See you next week.

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Ghostty 1.4 Is Faster and Uses Less RAM, but Drops Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Support

Ghostty is a terminal emulator from HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto that implements GPU acceleration while maintaining a native look on each supported platform.

On Linux, the app uses GTK, whereas on macOS, the app uses Swift.

The project claims it has millions of daily users, and many other terminal emulators have already adopted libghostty-vt, the C-based virtual terminal emulator library it offers.

The latest release, v1.4, is a major one with over 170 contributors and 2,800+ commits behind it. We will mostly focus on what Linux users get with a few changes from other platforms to get you up to speed.

What's new?

The reason why Ubuntu 24.04 LTS can't run native builds is that Ghostty 1.4 requires GTK 4.18 and libadwaita 1.7, causing an exit at startup if older libraries are loaded. The developers say that users can opt for an older build to get Ghostty running on their systems.

Anyhow, coming back to the release, the GTK app gets sharp text at fractional scaling, such as 125% or 150%, after it appeared blurry due to some upstream changes, and the rebuilt, triple-buffered renderer is expected to cut tearing.

Then you have the drag and drop ability for split windows, which macOS has had since 1.3, where a split can be dropped onto any other one, even in a different tab or window, with its running processes and working directory moving along with it.

Global keybinds on Wayland now use the vicinae-hotkey-v1 protocol on compositors like Hyprland 0.56 and newer and go through the desktop portal on the rest. This should improve hotkey behavior across different Wayland compositors.

Background blur now works on Niri, and a new +toggle-quick-terminal command helps window managers that can't register global shortcuts.

A few keyboard shortcuts have also been reworked in the GTK app:

• Ctrl+Shift+PageUp and Ctrl+Shift+PageDown can be used to move the current tab sideways.
• Jumping between the previous and next prompts can be done via Ctrl+Shift+Arrow-Up and Ctrl+Shift+Arrow-Down instead of only being handled by the jump_to_prompt action.

The clipboard value of copy-on-select now behaves differently, and anyone who relied on the old behavior is being told to switch to both. Off-screen scrollback is now compressed while the terminal sits idle, with the memory savings being estimated at 70% to 90%.

The compression has also made room for a higher default scrollback limit of 50MB, up from 10MB.

Some additional changes

Ghostty now implements the full Kitty graphics protocol, with the project claiming that no terminal besides Kitty itself has done that. There's also the new ghostty +ssh command that stands in for⁣ sshand installs Ghostty’s terminfo on the remote host before connecting.

Ten security issues were fixed, four of which affected macOS only, and the rest include a paste protection gap and a specially named directory that could get the zsh integration to send escape sequences, including ones that quietly replace your clipboard.

Mac users get support for macOS 27, while those with older Macs get macOS 13 support, which has been kept intact until the project drops it in a future release.

On Windows, the project has decided to drop GUI support from its roadmap and points downstream projects to libghostty and libghostty-vt, which are already built for Windows.

Get Ghostty 1.4

The Ghostty project only ships official binaries for macOS. On Linux, the various distributions package it themselves, with Arch Linux, NixOS, Alpine Linux, Gentoo, openSUSE and Ubuntu 26.04 being the ones that have it.

Community DEB, AppImage and Snap builds exist too, but building from source is recommended.

Ghostty

You can build Ghostty from the source tarball with zig build. The build guide has the steps you will need.

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Rocky Linux Creator Built a New "Not Linux" Kernel in 11 Days Using AI

Gregory Kurtzer is no stranger to the Linux world. He created CentOS, and when Red Hat messed it up, he started Rocky Linux as the community replacement. He also co-founded CIQ, the company offering enterprise support around Rocky.

His latest project has nothing to do with rebuilding another Linux distro, though. He has built an entirely new operating system kernel, and he didn't write most of the code himself. An AI agent did.

Meet Ginux, Linux userspace without Linux underneath

The project is called Ginux. It's an independent, Rust-first x86-64 kernel. Which simply means it is NOT a fork of the Linux kernel.

It has its own memory management, scheduler, process model, filesystems, networking, and device support, all written from scratch.

The most interesting part is that even though it is not Linux, it is Linux-compatible. Ginux implements the Linux ABI (the binary interface compiled programs use to talk to the kernel), so existing Linux binaries can run on it unmodified.

In the project's own terms, Linux is a "personality" that Ginux exposes, not the kernel running underneath.

Now, the name Ginux may sound like a mix of GNU and Linux. I hate to disappoint you, it is not the case here.

The G in Ginux stands for GPT. Greg. Kurtzer jokes in the README that, to keep his ego within limits, the G officially stands for GPT. Why GPT? Because it was coded entirely by (Chat) GPT 5.6 Sol.

Here's how Kurtzer announced it on X (formerly known as Twitter):

In 11 days, I built a new Linux-compatible operating system kernel that boots Rocky Linux 10 with systemd, all using Human-Directed Agentic Engineering (HDAE).

In 11 days, I built a new Linux-compatible operating system kernel that boots Rocky Linux 10 with systemd, all using Human-Directed Agentic Engineering (HDAE).

I call it Ginux. It is an independent, Rust-first x86-64 kernel (not a Linux fork) with its own memory management, boot…

— Gregory M. Kurtzer (@gmkurtzer) October 27, 2026

What Ginux can do today

Ginux builds as a single GINUX.EFI image that boots straight through UEFI, with no Linux host kernel involved.

It runs isolated "domains", each with its own processes, address space, filesystem, and lifecycle. The project describes these as stronger boundaries than OCI containers or Linux namespaces.

It can also pull and verify OCI container images and use them to assemble a domain's root filesystem. That's how it gets Rocky Linux 10 booted all the way to systemd's multi-user.target. Selected Alpine Linux programs (like the musl and BusyBox) run too.

Don't get too excited, though. Right now, Ginux runs only in a QEMU virtual machine, with no physical hardware profile, no GPU or NVMe support, and no independent security audit.

🚧

Ginux is a research prototype released under the Apache 2.0 license. It is not meant for production or as a Linux replacement.

What is Human-Directed Agentic Engineering?

HDAE is the name Kurtzer gives to the development method, and to be honest, that's the real story here. He has documented it in a technical report on Zenodo.

The idea is a clear division of labour. The human decides the architecture, the constraints, the milestones, the acceptance criteria, and when to stop. The AI agent runs the implementation loop: write code, boot it, test it, diagnose failures, revise, and repeat against those executable checks.

For Ginux, that meant one persistent OpenAI Codex task running GPT-5.6 Sol for eleven days. It produced approximately 139,000 retained lines of implementation and test code, across more than 1,000 commits. Architecture documents kept the agent aligned, and real userspaces like Rocky Linux caught bugs that synthetic tests missed.

The "human-directed" part matters. This isn't as simple as typing "write me a kernel, don't make mistakes" into a chatbot. It's a person with decades of systems experience steering an agent that does the heavy lifting of coding.

One expert plus AI can go a long way

Kurtzer is careful not to oversell this AI achievement:

The larger lesson is that AI can generate complex systems software, but compatibility, security, hardware support, standards, community, and long-term maintenance remain the real moat.

I think that's only fair. Linux isn't going anywhere because a prototype boots systemd in a VM. Decades of hardware enablement, code review, and community are not something an AI agent produces in eleven days.

But let's take a step back to realize what happened here. A new kernel created from scratch, that runs an enterprise distro. And it took just 11 days with GPT 5.6 (not even 6.1, the latest model).

AI won't replace expertise. An expert who already knows how kernels work uses AI to squeeze years of grunt work into days.

When people with deep domain knowledge pair it with frontier AI agents, projects that once needed a large team and several years start to look like weekend side projects.

Ginux won't replace Linux, but it does show how far (and how fast) an skilled person can now go.

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In a Setback to VMWare, Tesco is Looking to Migrate to Proxmox

Tesco, the supermarket group with stores in the UK and certain regions of Europe, is hiring a Head of Software Engineering for its Edge Platform. The new hire would be responsible for carrying out the move away from VMware, the Broadcom-owned virtualization software, to Proxmox for the systems that run inside its stores.

The Register were the ones who spotted the listing first, and so far it's the only public sign of the Proxmox plan. Tesco has not said how many stores the move covers or how fast the rollout will occur.

What edge means for a supermarket

Edge computing puts servers and software near the place where the business operates instead of in a faraway central datacenter, and for a supermarket chain, that place is the brick-and-mortar store.

Tesco's listing describes its Edge Platform as the computing environment and software that lets applications run across its stores. Checkout, payments, stock management, and staff-facing apps all depend on it.

The platform covers Linux, server hardware, virtualization, and storage. Stores also need to keep working through connectivity disruptions or when local resources run short, as a badly handled change can interfere with store operations, staff, and customers.

The ask

The hire would handle two jobs. The first is the migration, and it involves defining repeatable setups for different kinds of stores, testing each version before a gradual rollout, and automating installs, upgrades, rollbacks, and recovery.

Along the way, they would also manage any migration dependencies and risks so that critical store operations are not affected.

The second job is a management platform for every store, built as an API-first system for provisioning, monitoring, patching, and remote diagnostics. It has to cope with stores going offline and with systems drifting from their intended setup.

That platform should also evolve independently of any one infrastructure technology where practical. The hire leads engineering managers and principal engineers, and the listed skills include Java, Python, and Terraform.

Where the exit stands

Tesco bought perpetual VMware licenses in 2021, but Broadcom stopped supporting them in January 2026. They have had to pay third-party providers for support since then.

In its lawsuit, Tesco accuses Broadcom of refusing to honor the 2021 agreement and of abusing its market power. They say the end of 2027 is the earliest it can be off VMware and calls that timeline a significant risk to its business.

Tesco also alleges that one Broadcom offer this year came in around 175 percent above what its 2021 contract entitled it to.

---

Suggested Read 📖: Proxmox Virtual Environment now runs on ARM64.

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