A lot of this week came back to memory. It makes local AI machines scarce and expensive, it pushes the Raspberry Pi 5 to 385 dollars, and the head of OpenAI thinks it is wasted when it sits in a home PC. Next to that: a kernel with more changes than ever before, Zigbee software that gives up on 32-bit systems, and a radiator thermostat that overshoots in testing. We have no post of our own on the three topics below this week, so the sources are linked inline. The labels mean: verified (two independent sources read), reported (one source read), vendor-claimed, or inferred (our reading).

Deep Dive: Local AI hardware and the memory crisis

AMD mark — AMD supplies the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip in the ASRock box under test. (Quelle: Simple Icons, file amd.svg (CC0))

ASRock AI Box-A395: the fastest Strix Halo system tested so far

ServeTheHome reviewed ASRock Industrial's AI Box-A395 on 29 October, a barebones tower with a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (16 cores), Radeon 8060S and 128 GB of soldered LPDDR5X-8000. It has 10 GbE (AQC113) and 2.5 GbE, two PCIe Gen4 M.2 slots, an MCIO connector, an internal 400 W power supply, two BIOS chips and a watchdog. The review calls it the fastest Ryzen AI Max+ 395 system the team has had. Under load the chip reports 130 to 140 W; noise is 35 dBA at idle (studio: 34 dBA) and 42 dBA under load. For local models the team ran gpt-oss-120b, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Qwen3.8-27B and Nemotron; on the large requests a single user stayed in the mid-teens of tokens per second, according to the review. The limits are named in the review itself: the front ports are USB 2.0 only, and it is closer to an industrial PC than a workstation. The part we read gives no price. That AMD's successor, Gorgon Halo, arrives "in a matter of days" is ServeTheHome's statement alone, other sources only say the fourth quarter without a date. Status: reported, a single measurer.

Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB now costs 385 dollars

On 2 November Raspberry Pi said on its own blog that the 16 GB Pi 5 goes up by 80 dollars to 385 dollars, and the 16 GB Compute Module 5 variants go up by 40 dollars. The Pi 500+ keeps its price. The company cites a lack of alternative 16 GB DRAM supply and other shortages, and suggests using smaller memory tiers or older models where a project allows it. Phoronix reports the same increase with the same figures. Status: verified (vendor and Phoronix, both based on the same announcement).

Altman on DRAM in private PCs

On the podcast "Cheeky Pint", OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that from a global resource-allocation view it is "pretty terrible" that everyone has part of the scarce DRAM supply in their own machine, where it is used about five percent of the time. heise reads this as a jab at local AI with open models and names OpenAI itself as one of the main causes of the shortage. ComputerBase points out that the argument assumes private RAM mostly serves local AI. The backdrop is real: according to heise, Intel reported 16.5 billion dollars of third-quarter revenue but sees the PC market down about 20 percent because of RAM prices; SK Hynix expects scarcity until 2030, Intel better supply from mid-2027. ServeTheHome covers the same quarter under the headline "PC faces memory pressure". Status for the Altman statements: verified; the SK Hynix forecast comes from heise's summary.

Assessment: Anyone buying a local AI machine in 2026 pays a memory premium that no benchmark removes. The A395 measurements show that a 128 GB Strix Halo tower suits models in the 30-billion class and MoE models. Whether it carries several simultaneous users depends on the model and the context length. If the hardware is not urgent, the price after the Gorgon Halo launch is the number to wait for. For Raspberry Pi projects it is worth asking whether 4 or 8 GB is enough.

Deep Dive: Linux 7.4 and keeping package sources tidy

Linux 7.4 is expected to become this year's long-term kernel. (Quelle: Simple Icons, file linux.svg (CC0))

Linux 7.4-rc1: almost 20,000 commits in the merge window

Linus Torvalds released Linux 7.4-rc1 on 1 November. According to Phoronix the merge window was the largest ever, with almost 20,000 commits against the usual 15,000 or so. A second analysis counts 19,671 commits next to 16,267 for Linux 7.3 and 14,395 for 7.2. In his announcement Torvalds says he is glad the flood of AI-driven work lands in the merge window instead of arriving as fixes during stabilisation. He adds that many expect 7.4 to be the next LTS kernel, and that a third of the diff is AMD GPU register headers. Phoronix expects the release on 20 December. Among the changes, Phoronix lists AMD PerfOpt for Radeon iGPUs (for AI load), optional buffered IOmap for ext4 and HDMI 2.1 on by default in amdgpu. Status: reported, both texts have one author; we read the announcement quotes at Phoronix, not in the original on the kernel list.

Ubuntu splits firmware for GA and HWE kernels

According to linuxnews.de, Canonical wants to split the firmware package. The trigger, in the words of Canonical developer Juerg Haefliger on the Ubuntu mailing list, was two regressions on AMD hardware, caused by firmware backports for the HWE kernel 7.0 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS when running the older GA kernel. The metapackage linux-firmware-hwe is meant to carry the firmware matching the HWE kernel, while anyone staying on the GA kernel keeps the current firmware. Status: reported; we did not read the mailing list itself.

APT 3.3.5: faster solver, Signed-By without fingerprints

According to linuxnews.de, quoting the changelog, APT 3.3.5 resolves dependencies 10 to 20 percent faster with 65 percent fewer page faults; download and install are unaffected. More important for operations: Signed-By with a key fingerprint is now deprecated, and references to keyring files are the way forward. Sources that already use their own key files do not change. Status: reported, the percentages are vendor-claimed (changelog).

Assessment: The merge window says something about kernel development, nothing about the stability of 7.4; the -rc weeks will show that. For operations the two small items matter more. On Ubuntu LTS servers, uname -r shows whether the GA or the HWE kernel runs. In the package sources, grep -r "Signed-By" /etc/apt/ shows whether an entry still names a fingerprint instead of a key file.

Deep Dive: Smart home in operation

Home Assistant mark — Home Assistant is the platform where Zigbee2MQTT and the Sonoff thermostat under test do their work. (Quelle: Simple Icons, file homeassistant.svg (CC0))

Zigbee2MQTT: 32-bit support ends in April 2027

With version 2.14.3, Zigbee2MQTT announced the end of 32-bit support. According to the notice in the project it ends when Node.js 22 reaches end of life in April 2027; Node.js 24 then becomes the minimum, and it ships no official 32-bit builds. This applies to every installation method, and the 32-bit Docker images (including linux/386 and linux/arm/v6) run out. dpkg --print-architecture shows whether a system is affected: amd64 or arm64 are fine, armhf is 32-bit. That covers the Raspberry Pi 1, Zero and Zero W, plus a Pi 3 or Zero 2 W running a 32-bit OS. SmarthomeAssistent adds that the release brings 60 new devices and that Home Assistant OS has been 64-bit only since version 17.0; we did not cross-check the second point. Anyone migrating backs up the data directory and keeps the Zigbee stick, which according to the article usually means no re-pairing of devices. Status: verified (project and independent report).

Sonoff TRV Gen2: cheap, with overshoot

Heise Bestenlisten tested the Zigbee thermostat (TRV-ZBT) on 1 November. It works without a gateway over Bluetooth through the eWeLink app, or over Zigbee, in the test with Zigbee2MQTT. In a 4 m² bathroom with a towel radiator it rose to almost 28 °C at a setpoint of 26 °C. With an external sensor and the offset method in Home Assistant the overshoot did not occur. The window-open detection (1.5 °C drop in 4.5 minutes, per the vendor) triggered on a cold pack in the test, but in a well-insulated room the internal sensor does not reach the threshold when airing, in the test's judgement. The price is from about 35 euros (Aqara W600 43, Danfoss Ally 61). Battery life cannot be judged after one week. Status: reported, a single test.

evcc and Matter accessories

Two more items sit in the digest: evcc 0.318.2 fixes an overwritten emergency-power reserve on FoxESS H3, and Sonoff ships a Matter presence sensor for 24.90 euros.

Assessment: For the thermostat, the control loop decides its worth, not the display: a cheap valve with an external sensor beats an expensive one that only measures itself. For Zigbee2MQTT there is time until April 2027, but a Pi 3 on a 32-bit system needs a new image, not just an update.

Digest: Other important news

Label at the end of each line: verified (two sources read), reported (one source read), vendor-claimed (figure comes from the vendor).

Security

CVE-2026-98432: Claude exploit for a Linux kernel flaw A use-after-free in IPv4 TCP connection setup (CVSS 9.8 per the kernel team), fixed in the kernel since early October. On 27 October Anthropic showed a root exploit against servers with MPTCP, produced by an unreleased research model, taking about 53 minutes. CSO Online confirms the key facts. Anthropic has not published exploit code or the kernel version. The flaw is not in the CISA KEV list (as of 30 October). To do: apply the distribution's kernel update, and check with sysctl net.mptcp.enabled whether MPTCP is active; whether a server without MPTCP could be attacked the same way is open. | verified
Attacks on Ivanti Connect Secure, Drupal Commerce and Synology DSM Since early October attackers chain three Ivanti flaws (CVE-2026-104935, CVE-2026-111357, CVE-2026-118527); all three are in the CISA KEV catalogue. Drupal Commerce Core needs 3.3.13 or 8.x-2.41. Synology warns of ransomware against DSM versions without the December 2024 fixes. | reported (KEV entries checked ourselves)
Claude Code extension in the Cursor marketplace carried a backdoor Version 2.1.313 of "Claude Code for VS Code" held an SSH backdoor and, per Cursor, was online on Thursday from 10:27 to 21:35 (CET), with up to 5,000 users affected according to Reuters. A logic error mostly stopped SSH from being enabled, but the malware dropped SSH keys and persisted. Clean from 2.1.314. | reported

Hardware

Intel Q3: 16.5 billion dollars revenue, shares fall by a quarter Profit down 18 percent to 3.3 billion, fourth-quarter guidance 15 to 16 billion, constraints in manufacturing and package substrates. See above. | verified
Fritz! guarantees at least six years of updates A new page lists "updates available until at least" per device. Market launch counts, not purchase date; it is a minimum guarantee. | reported

AI and development

Windows 11: agent search controls the PC Insider build 26340.9843 in the Experimental channel adds inline actions (volume, brightness, pointer size from the search box) and phone actions for Android. | reported

Software releases

Rufus 4.16 beta works around an AMI NTFS bug AMI's NTFS driver in UEFI firmware misreads data, so the optional UEFI media check in Rufus reports corrupt files. Rufus works around it. The "millions of affected PCs" figure is the developer's claim without evidence. | reported

Smart home

evcc 0.318.2 The FoxESS H3 Pro/Smart template overwrote the configured emergency reserve when switching to normal mode; the update no longer writes the EPS setting. Released 1 November. | reported
Homebridge 2.5.0 Matter device types for solar, storage, wallboxes, meters and water heaters; whether they arrive depends on the plugin and the platform. | reported
Sonoff SenseGuard Presence Core 24G Matter-over-Wi-Fi presence sensor with 24 GHz radar and a local web interface for 24.90 euros, range up to four metres per the vendor. | vendor-claimed

From the blog

Published this week:

Sources for this edition

Deep Dive local AI hardware: ServeTheHome on the AI Box-A395, Raspberry Pi, price changes, Phoronix on Raspberry Pi, heise on Altman, ComputerBase on Altman, heise on Intel, ServeTheHome on Intel
Deep Dive Linux 7.4: Phoronix, 7.4-rc1, Phoronix, merge window, linuxnews.de on Ubuntu firmware, linuxnews.de on APT 3.3.5
Deep Dive smart home: Zigbee2MQTT, 32-bit notice, Zigbee2MQTT 2.14.3, SmarthomeAssistent on Zigbee2MQTT, heise Bestenlisten on the Sonoff TRV Gen2
Digest: linuxnews.de on CVE-2026-98432, CSO Online, CISA, KEV catalogue, heise on Ivanti, Drupal, Synology, heise on Cursor, ComputerBase on Fritz!, ComputerBase on Windows 11, ComputerBase on Rufus, SmarthomeAssistent on evcc, SmarthomeAssistent on Homebridge, SmarthomeAssistent on Sonoff SenseGuard
Logos (CC0): Simple Icons, AMD, Simple Icons, Linux, Simple Icons, Home Assistant

Compiled on Monday, 2 November 2026. Sources: see above. Anything that arrives after that goes into the next edition.

IT News Week 45/2026: Strix Halo box tested, 16 GB Raspberry Pi 5 at 385 dollars, Linux 7.4-rc1, Zigbee2MQTT drops 32-bit