Big Blue Is Right On Schedule With Fall 2026 IBM i Tech Refreshes
November 2, 2026 Alex Woodie
After delaying the spring Technology Refreshes for three months earlier this year, IBM is back on track with the fall TRs. IBM i shops will find a raft of new capabilities in the newly announced IBM i 7.6 TR3 and 7.5 TR9, including new services for tracking security patches, performance improvements for networking and storage, and sundry other improvements up and down and across the stack.
Big Blue announced IBM i 7.6 TR3 and IBM i 7.5 TR9 on October 27, and plans to deliver the new capabilities and updates on November 20, although some components of the announcement will be delivered on their own schedule, and some have already been released (such as the latest versions of Code for i, RDi, and ACS, among others). Besides core operating system and firmware updates – of which there are several in these releases – the TRs essentially function as a batch-oriented rollup for various IBM i facilities that are developed on their own timelines.
In this story, we’ll cover the core operating system enhancements in the fall 2026 TRs and provide a brief overview of the top new features in other IBM i facilities. In future stories, we’ll dig into the specifics of the enhancements for other IBM i products, components, and facilities.
Core OS Upgrades – Security First
There are various security enhancements in the operating system and its integrated database. In particular, both IBM i 7.6 and 7.5 will gain new SQL-based IBM i services for ensuring that IBM i customers have the latest patches for security vulnerabilities, delivered via program temporary fixes (PTFs), installed for IBM i-related security vulnerabilities documented in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database.
“Security is top of mind for every client,” IBM i Product Manager Brandon Pederson tells IT Jungle. “We like to talk about how you can do almost everything on the system with SQL. And so we have a few new IBM SQL services to manage and keep your CVEs current.”
The big one is a new CVE_CURRENCY table function in SYSTOOLs, along with an accompanying CVE_CURRENCY view. These IBM i service take the CVE data returned from a CVE_INFO query and determine whether the current IBM i system is missing PTFs that remediate a CVE. IBM introduced CVE_INFO function with the spring TRs earlier this year.
“Clients can call that SQL service to see ‘What CVEs do I have currently on my system? What do I need to update? Which do I need to install?’” says Pederson, who moved from the marketing side of the house into product management earlier this year as part of a broader change of IBM i management. “And so it just makes it even easier to keep your security up to date, keep your system up to date.”
IBM also issued a new table function, called DEFECTIVE_PTF_CURRENCY_LOCAL, to determine whether an IBM i server that is unable to connect to the Internet is missing PTFs that remediate a defective PTF. IBM has issued a flurry of security patches for IBM i this year, as documented in Doug Bidwell’s IBM i PTF Guide, including some that were defective.
It’s notable that IBM is giving customers better tools to manage security PTFs, such as the ability to see when PTFs were displayed in the Display PTF Group (DSPPTFGRP) command, which it delivered with the launch of IBM i 7.6 in April 2025. That function is exclusive to IBM i 7.6. However, the new PTF-related IBM i services that IBM announced last week apply to both IBM i 7.5 and 7.6.
Both current operating systems also gain enhancements to the Digital Certificate Manager (DCM), which is how IBM i customers manage digital security certificates and private encryption keys. IBM is delivering new APIs to allow customers to programmatically create and delete security certificates, without using the DCM’s GUI. It also updated an API to allow users to renew a certificate with a new public/private key pair using the same label.
Telnet print jobs now require authentication before printing with the latest releases of IBM i 7.6 and 7.5. Either a proper combination of username and password or a valid Kerberos authentication key will be needed. IBM is also actively restricting Telnet print jobs to users who are authorized to access the system. (So much for printing your own bonus checks.)
Other Enhancements: The Need For Speed
Do you like speedy storage area networks? If you do, then you’ll be happy to know that IBM is delivering performance enhancements for Fibre Channel-connected SANs. Specifically, administrators can now set their own timeouts for switching to secondary Fibre Channel connections instead of being forced to wait two minutes, which was IBM’s default. However, this “fast fail multi-path” feature is only available on IBM i 7.6.
Here’s another performance boost: TCP traffic could potentially speed up and latency drop thanks to adjustments that IBM has made with its networking code. IBM says that configurations with high bandwidth adapters will have the greatest likelihood of seeing improvements. No work is required on the part of users for this enhancement, which is for both IBM i 7.6 TR3 and 7.5 TR9.
Both IBM i 7.6 and 7.5 users will benefit from new testing limits for using off-the-shelf USB flash drives with IBM i servers. While IBM doesn’t qualify or recommend particular drives, it does periodically test to make sure third-party drives actually work with IBM i. IBM previously only tested a smattering of drives up to 256 GB. Now it will test drives with capacities up to 1TB.
The final non-database, OS-related enhancement is related to performance monitoring. With Power11, IBM added a new firmware feature that allows logical partitions (LPARs) to be assigned to Resource Groups. The Power11 firmware ensures that LPARs inside a Resource Group are the only LPARs able to use the processors assigned to that Resource Group. With 7.5 and 7.6, IBM has added support to ensure that Resource Group IDs are readable by Collection Services, the built-in performance data collection facility of IBM i, thereby ensuring that processor utilization by Resource Group can be calculated without forcing the user to go to the HMC.
Database, AppDev, and HA – Oh My!
On the database front, IBM issued two new functional enhancements to Db2 for i, for the SELF facility and HTTP logging functions. It issued 10 new IBM i services and enhanced six more for 7.6. For 7.5, it issued eight new IBM i services and enhanced six more. We’ll dig further into these enhancements in a future story.
There’s a variety of new application development capabilities in these two releases, including new COBOL and RPG functions in the Rational Development Studio for i compiler. The Code for i project, which is managed on GitHub but receives resources from IBM, continues its forward march. IBM has not (yet) abandoned Rational Developer for i (RDi), IBM’s fat-client, Eclipse-based IDE. It delivered RDi 9.9.0.5 in August, with several new capabilities.
Bob, which is also on its own development cycle, continues to be an active project. Bob Premium Package for i was announced in June. You can read about Bob here.
IBM is delivering a new Web interface with BRMS, the popular backup and recovery software product that is licensed separately from the operating system. It also is delivering updates to Db2 Mirror for i, the clustering-based system resiliency offering, which gets secure messaging between nodes and new SQL services to determine database object dependency relationships.
Migrate While Active, the Db2 Mirror-based offering IBM launched in late 2024 to help customers move their IBM i environments to new servers running in the PowerVS cloud or running on-prem, also gets some love. Specifically, MWA gets new startup options that should prevent unexpected application and job execution on the target during migration, synch, and cutover.
Finally, IBM is adding a new PowerVS deployment option to PowerHA SystemMirror, its logical replication-based high availability offering. The new offering, which features the svelte name “PowerHA Full System Manager for Power Virtual Server,” essentially provides an IBM sanctioned version of PowerHA SystemMirror running in its PowerVS cloud. We’ll dig into this new offering for a future story.
Tomorrow, IBM will dig into the fall 2026 TRs during a Guided Tour featuring new IBM i Chief Architect Kris Whitney and his top lieutenants Scott Forstie (database), Tim Rowe (appdev/sysmgmt), and Tim Mullenbach (security). You can register for the webinar, which takes place on November 4 at 10 a.m. ET, at this URL.
In the meantime, you can read the IBM Software Announcements for IBM i 7.6 TR3 here and for IBM i 7.5 TR9 here. You can also check out the more detailed IBM Support pages for IBM i 7.6 TR3 here and for IBM i 7.5 TR9 here.
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