ITWire has picked up on the latest news surrounding the ongoing development of Mac OS X 10.5.7, the upcoming maintenance update for Leopard users. The report says that the driver for ATI Radeon HD 4870 Graphics Upgrade Kit for Mac Pro (Early 2009 or Early 2008) is part of OS X 10.5.7.

ITWire acknowledges that the seed notes accompanying 9J27 list at least nine issues fixed since the previous 10.5.7 developer build (9J22). Particularly, those issues related to syncing processes, Timen Capsule and system prefs. A tenth issue, "with AC interrupts and Sleep/Wake," also seems to be present in Mac OS X Leopard, which Apple, apparently, hasn't documented in the latest developer builds. In the meanwhile, developers are still being asked to use their testing skills on fixing data synchronization, as well as networking, graphics drivers, Mail, printing and more.

However, the report also mentions that “the 'ATI Radeon HD 4870 Graphics Upgrade Kit for Mac Pro (Early 2009 or Early 2008)' is scheduled to ship in 5-7 weeks. Although the product description says the card requires 'Mac OS X v10.5.6 or later', it is known that the driver for this family of graphics chips are part of 10.5.7,” ITWire's Stephen Withers writes. “While Apple could theoretically uncouple the driver from the OS update, that's not the way things usually work - except for new computer models which do from time to time ship with special builds of an existing OS release that have been augmented with hardware-specific features.”

World of Apple, the source of the seed notes for Build 9J27, claims that “development appears to be moving quickly on Mac OS X 10.5.7.” Safari 4 Beta still isn't supported at this particular time. A second issue plaguing the build is related to CoreRAIDServer crashing once per restart.

According to the aforementioned source, going by the latest seed notes, OS X 10.5.7 should arrive in no more than a few weeks.