Parrot OS 7.3 has just been released and now ships whith opt-in repositories with several packages optimized for amd64v3 and arm64v8.2
the documentation page does not simply explain how to enable them, but also goes into the implementation details and describes how it was achieved https://www.parrotsec.org/docs/configuration/parrot-optimized-builds
has anyone tried it yet?
Parrot OS 7.3 has just been released and now ships whith opt-in repositories with several packages optimized for amd64v3 and arm64v8.2
the documentation page does not simply explain how to enable them, but also goes into the implementation details and describes how it was achieved https://www.parrotsec.org/docs/configuration/parrot-optimized-builds
has anyone tried it yet?
Parrot 7.3 is out, and this release is about the system rather than the toolset.
The headline is performance. We now ship an opt-in repository of packages recompiled for newer CPU baselines, x86-64-v3 on amd64 and ARMv8.2-A on arm64. On compute-heavy work like compression, encryption, hashing and media encoding, that runs somewhere between 20% and 50% faster, and security updates keep arriving immediately because package selection is driven purely by version comparison.
On the usability side, the menu system has been rewritten in Go. Every tool now appears in the menu and installs with a single click, with no shell scripts and no leftover dependencies.
There are also official Vagrant boxes for the Home and Security editions, so a clean, reproducible Parrot instance is one vagrant up away, plus a new Firefox start page that collects no data.
Full release notes: https://parrotsec.org/blog/2026-06-30-parrot-7.3-release-notes/
Upgrade with: sudo parrot-upgrade
We're experimenting with CPU-optimized package builds in Parrot Security, available as opt-in repository components. Same packages as the regular archive, recompiled to use modern CPU features.
What it is
Two new components rebuild a curated set of packages with:
-march=x86-64-v3 (AVX, AVX2, FMA, BMI1/2, MOVBE, F16C) for amd64v3
-march=armv8.2-a+dotprod+fp16+crypto (LSE atomics, DOTPROD, FP16, crypto extensions) for arm64v8.2
The components are additive — they sit alongside the regular amd64/arm64 archive and apt automatically prefers the optimized variant when one exists. Nothing else is touched.
Hardware coverage
Check your hardware first:
/usr/bin/ld.so --help | grep -A4 Subdirectories
or
grep -m1 ^flags /proc/cpuinfo
What's optimized
Priority order, focused on packages where compute work actually happens in compiled code:
Network daemons, shells, and I/O-bound infrastructure are intentionally left at baseline — recompiling them gives nothing measurable.
How to enable
Add the appropriate line to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/parrot-optimized.list
deb https://deb.parrot.sh/direct/parrot echo amd64v3
or
deb https://deb.parrot.sh/direct/parrot echo arm64v8.2
Then sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade. Apt picks the optimized version for packages that have one; everything else stays on the regular archive.
Works on plain Debian too
We've also been testing these components on stock Debian servers, especially for compression-heavy and crypto-heavy workloads where the gain is most visible. Same sources.list lines work.
If you understand what any of this means and want to try it, we'd love to hear your opinion.
this is an early experiment, and more info (and proper documentation) will come soon
