IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8: what is in them

The first technology refreshes of 2026 are out: IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8, announced on 15 July alongside the new entry-level Power S1112 server, with the PTF groups available for download from the 24th.

Nothing here changes how the work is done. This is a maintenance TR, with seventeen new IBM i Services and ten improved ones spread across the system. But three or four items take manual work away from whoever administers it, and one concerns anybody who sends mail from the system — which is nearly everybody.

The one to look at first: mail

The integrated mail server gains OAuth 2.0 support for SMTP.

This is not one more feature: it is the answer to a problem heading for many installations. The large mail providers have stopped, or are stopping, accepting password-only authentication on SMTP servers. A system sending batch notifications through a company account on one of those services will, sooner or later, stop sending them — and the symptom is the worst kind: no visible error, the mail simply stops arriving and nobody notices until one of those notifications is needed.

Anyone using SNDSMTPEMM to give notice at the end of processing now has a route to staying compliant without changing how the mail is sent.

Security: knowing which vulnerabilities concern you

SYSTOOLS.CVE_INFO() is a table function that queries the public vulnerability database and returns the ones affecting the release in use, with severity scores.

It is the kind of thing that used to be done by hand, reading bulletins and wondering whether they applied to your machine, and which therefore in practice was not done. A query you can schedule and email changes the nature of the task: from a project to a routine check.

Alongside it comes SYSTOOLS.GROUP_PTF_CURRENCY_LOCAL(), which checks the level of the PTF groups. Together the two answer the two questions a manager gets asked during an audit: which known vulnerabilities affect us, and how far behind are we on fixes.

On 7.6 only come customer-managed encryption keys — BYOK, with IBM Cloud Key Protect — and QSYS2.EKM_INFO() for seeing their state. This is material for anyone running the system in the cloud with formal compliance requirements: anyone not in that position can skip it.

Overrides, queryable at last

SYSTOOLS.OVERRIDE_INFO_ALL shows active file overrides in SQL.

It looks like a minor item and it is the one that will save the most hours. An OVRDBF forgotten without a DLTOVR is one of the most insidious causes of wrong behaviour: the program reads the file somebody else put in front of it, there is no error, and the result is simply wrong. Until yesterday, noticing meant suspecting it; from now on it is a query.

Journals readable without decoding by hand

CREATE_DATA_JOURNAL_READER turns the hexadecimal data of journal entries into a readable form.

Anyone who has tried to work out what was changed in a record by reading a DSPJRN knows why this matters: the before and after images were always there, but in hexadecimal, and reconstructing them meant knowing the record layout and counting bytes. It is the tool you need when the question is "who changed this amount, and when".

The rest, briefly

• SYSTOOLS.CHECK_COMMAND_SYNTAX() — checks the syntax of a CL command from SQL. Useful in anything that builds commands dynamically before running them.
• QSYS2.GEOGRAPHIC_MIRRORING_INFO — the state of geographic mirroring.
• FROM_SYSTEM_TIMESTAMP and TO_SYSTEM_TIMESTAMP, trigger pseudo columns giving the file, library and member that raised the event, RFC3986 encoding for REST calls, and filtering by user on QSYS2.SQL_ERROR_LOG.
• Outside the operating system: ACS 1.1.9.13 brings the SQL Error Logging Facility into Run SQL Scripts; Code for i adds support for SSH keys with a passphrase and improves RPG and CL; in Navigator the Performance Data Investigator charts move to Angular.

What to do now

Nothing urgent, with one exception. The sensible order is this.

Check where you stand. A TR does not change the version number, and that is exactly why people fall behind without noticing: a system "on 7.5" can be sitting on a TR from three years ago and be counted as up to date in a meeting.

WRKPTFGRP

Look at the mail, if you send mail from the system. It is the only item with a real deadline, because it does not depend on us: it depends on when the mail provider stops accepting the old authentication.

Plan the application the way PTFs are planned, that is, alongside an IPL and not on a Friday. A TR is a group of PTFs: it is applied with the same care and on the same timescale as any maintenance, and some fixes only become active after the IPL.

Sources. The official list of contents is on the IBM Technology Refresh page, and that is the one to consult before deciding anything. The details on individual functions cited above come from the trade press — IT Jungle on the Db2 contents and RPGPGM.COM on the availability date.