7 ms·

OpenBSD 7.8

285 points by paulnpace 1y ago

mwambua 1y ago
Ooh, looks like the Raspberry Pi 5 is now supported!
- miclill 1y ago
  Not sure if wifi and bluetooth work though?: since: > o Implement support for "vmmc-supply" in sdhc(4), needed to power on the WiFi chip on the Raspberry Pi 5.
  - cenamus 1y ago
    There's no bluetoot stack at least that part is definitely not supported
    - lproven 1y ago
      In other word, Bluetooth on Raspi is supported 100% as well as Bluetooth on all other platforms. ;-)
  - brynet 1y ago
    wifi works, it's bwfm(4).
razighter777 1y ago
Great work from the OpenBSD team. Happily suprised to the continued commitment to support new hardware.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45660634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45660634
brynet 1y ago
OpenBSD 7.8 release artwork by "Apsephion" https://www.openbsd.org/images/Terraodontidae.png https://www.openbsd.org/images/Terraodontidae.png https://www.openbsd.org/images/puffy78.gif https://www.openbsd.org/images/puffy78.gif https://www.openbsd.org/78.html https://www.openbsd.org/78.html
- merlincorey 1y ago
  Too bad they haven't done a release song since 7.3: https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#73 https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#73
fujigawa 1y ago
The most compact, minimalist general purpose OS out there by far. Tiny memory footprint and loaded with network services built-in. Linux has become so bloated its users can't in good conscience make fun of Microsoft anymore, they are worse. Debian refuses to install with less than 512MB RAM, the text only installer will choke with less than that, it's pathetic. That's a console-only install, no GUI.
- mycall 1y ago
  Alpine Linux is similar in spirit to openbsd, slim and secure but perhaps with less features oobe.
  - fujigawa 1y ago
    They cheat and use busybox. Meanwhile OpenBSD running all the default network services like sshd and smtpd uses < 32 MB RAM and that's with full ksh and real tools. That doesn't happen by accident.
    - argsnd 1y ago
      Is that fair? Busybox has fewer features than OpenBSD coreutils but those in turn have fewer features than GNU coreutils. All three implement the entire POSIX spec as far as I am aware.
- casparvitch 1y ago
  you're right, 60MB for alpine is really pushing hardware capabilities in 2025
- j3th9n 1y ago
  I love it you can still install the latest OpenBSD on 32MB RAM systems.
  - daneel_w 1y ago
    But you can't effectively run it on that little memory, since over a decade.
citbl 1y ago
I'm surprised seeing improvements in Suspend/Hibernate support. I've used OpenBSD on laptops before and it was _fine_. I thought they primarily target servers. This feels like laptop specific improvements. Perhaps to the benefits only to those developing OpenBSD.
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  The OpenBSD developers (in)famously use ThinkPads almost exclusively, so it works really great on ThinkPads, and much less well on other laptops.
  - citbl 1y ago
    Incidentally it was also on a thinkpad that I had installed it. Honestly I've never owned any other laptops than thinkpads and macbooks. Every other laptop I've ever touched in a computer shop left me with "eww".
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  Every computer I have ever owned has regularly failed miserably at suspended, or more accurately resuming. Even my Steam Deck, with it's top down firmware and OS development regularly fails to suspend our freezes on resume.
  - CSSer 1y ago
    I'll bite. You ever owned a macbook?
    - gnabgib 1y ago
      Sounds like they only thing they've owned. But maybe I'm running the perfect windows and linux distros.. and my macs are out of spec.
  - masklinn 1y ago
    Apple generally has excellent sleep support, even on my old falling-to-pieces unibody which would KP if you looked at it funny I don’t remember résume ever being a concern. I’m not going to say their ever degrading software quality won’t affect that one day, and I know that some updates have caused issues for some people, but I genuinely can’t remember it ever failing me and not doing its job correctly.
president_zippy 1y ago
I'm impressed that they still maintain PA-RISC support even though HP discontinued that architecture in 2008. They maintain all these architectures in such a small, consolidated codebase with such minimal (if any) bloat. Their built-in httpd is far and away the best experience I ever had setting up a static file server for my local network, and I can't think of many times where I would ever need anything I couldn't do with the built-in FastCGI support. I'm also pleasantly surprised by how well Chicago95 (a Windows 95-style UI based on xfce) works on OpenBSD, even though the author never intended to run it on anything but xubuntu. I wouldn't recommend trying that unless you're willing to roll up your sleeves, but the payoff definitely justifies the elbow grease if you like that look and feel better than xenodm, XFCE, or GNOME.
- citbl 1y ago
  hmmmmm youth. I remember running windows95 overnight so that it could be a "server". The next morning, moving the mouse was making the harddrive go nuts, it was paging just by moving the cursor! Memory leak galore. This makes me want to run linux as my daily driver! [1] [1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Screenshots/SCREENSHOTS.md https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Screensho...
  - pasc1878 1y ago
    Well Windows 95 was never a server. MS already had the much better NT and in those days it was not bloated.
    - microtonal 1y ago
      Yeah. When I was a high school student, we set up the new school network (end of the 90s). We used Windows NT on all the desktops and the domain/file server and SuSE Linux as a firewall/router. The whole setup was super stable and NT ran well, even on the modest desktop hardware. When we graduated, maintenance was taken over by a local consumer PC builder and had no clue experience maintaining corporate/organization networks. They replaced all desktops and servers by Windows 9x (probably 98), as it was all they knew and the network was constantly down, desktops broken/compromised, etc. NT 4.0 was a really good OS in those days for servers/work desktops. It was less great for games (though IIRC there was DirectX at some point).
zdw 1y ago
Has anyone benchmarked TCP performance now that it's outside of the global kernel lock? I wonder how useful this will be for the modest but still multicore systems used for firewalls.
- daneel_w 1y ago
  Network performance has gotten steadily better during the last three or so years, to the tune of most network drivers today seeing around 2x throughput compared to a few years back. I have a retired mid-2010s Celeron platform which managed about 300 Mbit/s on OpenBSD 7.1/7.2. With OpenBSD 7.6 it reached well over 700 MBit/sec. I also have an early 2020s Atom platform which saturates its 2.5GbE interface without any problems. Not all of the network drivers perform equally but the network stack improvements have all the same made them take pretty big leaps.
- IcePic 1y ago
  Yes, at http://bluhm.genua.de/perform/results/perform.html http://bluhm.genua.de/perform/results/perform.html (a bit down on the page) which was also mentioned during bluhm@s talk on EuroBSDCon 2025() recently. Then again, the sentence "tcp is outside of global lock" is very generalized, there are so many parts that got out of the kernel lock in pieces, like ip input, routing lookups and device packet handling that it is hard to talk about it as one singular thing that you just flip a switch on to make it MP-performant. You could make filesystem code mp, disk device drivers mp and then still run on an IDE-disk which forces all IO to be one at a time and serialized first-come-first-served at which point all the work was for 'nothing'. Same goes for networking, there are many many layers and places that all need code that actually allows for MP processing to improve its performance, fine grained locks (which reduce perf at this stage), then prove that the fine grained locks are sufficient for ALL use cases, all kinds of layering violations that could possibly happen, then you can unlock this single layer, and move to the next if nothing acts up on any machine. ) https://www.youtube.com/live/wEM-E-IJ6sY?si=X3lLX9tEIO2mcEJl&t=28256 https://www.youtube.com/live/wEM-E-IJ6sY?si=X3lLX9tEIO2mcEJl...
- Arch-TK 1y ago
  Not benchmarked on my system yet but I use OpenBSD on my home router (PCEngines APU2) and even before this stuff, OpenBSD could handle 1Gbit just fine. And that's with VLANs, LACP, a good number of PF rules, etc.
avadodin 1y ago
SEV and CC in general looks interesting seeing the slides. I hadn't heard of it yet. Someone more knowledgeable than me will say if these encrypted VMs are also protected from bugged modules within the SoC or on the bus besides being protected from the hypervisor. It also seems that they are adding inter-core features but I don't know whether they are related to removing locks within the kernel, embedded applications, or if they are moving to micro-kernel internally.
- libroot 1y ago
  No, these encrypted VMs are not protected from buggy or malicious on-die components. SEV assumes that the SoC hardware is trusted.[1] And we don't even have to go that deep: both AMD SEV and Intel's equivalent, Intel SGX, have historically been vulnerable to side-channel and speculative-execution attacks, among others, that can undermine their isolation guarantees.[2] [1]: "As with the previous SEV and SEV-ES features, under SEV-SNP the AMD System-on-Chip (SOC) hardware, the AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP), and the VM itself are all treated as fully trusted." https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/epyc-business-docs/white-papers/SEV-SNP-strengthening-vm-isolation-with-integrity-protection-and-more.pdf https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/epyc-busine... [2]: https://libroot.org/posts/trusted-execution-environments/ https://libroot.org/posts/trusted-execution-environments/
  - avadodin 1y ago
    bummer nice overview article btw backdoors in the supply chain are always hard to avoid but if it can't even protect against third-party attackers including any of the hardware attached what's the point
    - all2 1y ago
      Rip-packs and drill guards are designed for running system protection. Those don't protect against compromised components, though, so select your hardware with care?
yellowapple 1y ago
Congrats on another release. Upgrading my machines went without a hitch :)
- idatum 1y ago
  Same.sysupgrade went flawlessly.
  - anthk 1y ago
    Ditto here; upgrades are very boring under OpenBSD. You can keep the same setup for ages, even more with cwm, xterm, mupdf, mpv and a bunch of CLI/TUI tools and games...
    - yellowapple 1y ago
      The only thing I hate about how boring OpenBSD upgrades are is that I often forget that there are new features I could be exploiting for my server configs. Everything works too smoothly so I'm rarely (if ever) forced to dive into the docs to fix things.
dlevine 1y ago
When I was in the college in the early 2000s, I had a friend who ran OpenBSD. He always sang its praises, mostly because it was the most secure operating system. I tried a bunch of Linux Distributions and FreeBSD before mostly settling on MacOS, but never actually got around to running it. Glad to see OpenBSD is still being actively developed.
- Flamingoat 1y ago
  I used to use it at University after one of the guys I was in labs with was using it for his daily driver. The first release I tried was 3.8. It was quite a shock coming from SuSE 9.2. It was much easier to install than FreeBSD, however the installer is even more archaic than FreeBSD. Someone wrote a graphical installer years ago and but nobody bothered with it. The BSDs really need at least something like the archinstall. It is certainly different than Linux. You really need to read the FAQ and manuals as you won't find much out by doing a web search, unlike Linux. One of the other things that differs from Linux is that supported hardware / software will work, however Linux hardware support is obviously a lot better than in 2005 when I first started looking at OpenBSD.
  - somat 1y ago
    Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly. When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.
    - ninjin 1y ago
      It feels like Alpine tries to imitate the OpenBSD installer somewhat as well, but it is just not the same as it forces you to make choices between SSH servers, NTP daemons, etc. So, it still very much feels like the Linux "pick and mix box". What makes OpenBSD so special is that there is one choice, it tends to be a good choice, and it is the only choice they will support and therefore they will put in the hours to make it solid.
    - 1y ago
cyberpunk 1y ago
> TCP stack is now running in parallel on multiple CPUs. This should be a nice improvement for my firewalls, some testing on the cards today me thinks.
- hsjdjdbsbsjshsg 1y ago
  Yeah agreed
- juped 1y ago
  Yeah, my home connection goes through a very low-spec protectli, but "low-spec" these days means "4 cores"...
imiric 1y ago
I'm a long-time Linux user, but have always been drawn to OpenBSD, in large part due to the team's philosophy on software. I wish I had the willpower to switch to it as my main OS, but unfortunately, my workflow is too dependent on popular software and cutting-edge hardware, which historically don't work too well on OpenBSD. I don't blame the team for it—in fact I applaud their unwavering commitment to their values. It's what makes the system great, after all. Regardless, I'm grateful that everyone can still benefit from the great set of tools that were started, and most still maintained, in the OpenBSD project. OpenSSH, PF, tmux, etc. They're a beacon of light in the software world.
- ectospheno 1y ago
  I use a dell laptop running openbsd as my primary computer. A proxmox server in my house runs any new hotness I need.
liendolucas 1y ago
What truly suprises me about BSDs is their simplicity and low footprint, OpenBSD being gold standard. I've been playing with `byve` the last two weeks (I highly recommend vermaden's blog for anyone interested in BSDs and obviously the handbooks of each project) and I'm seriously thinking not doing a dual boot Linux install again. On my old x230 (which is running FreeBSD) I will be installing OpenBSD just to become more familiar with it. I still don't get why just after installing Debian `top` shows me around 200 proceses. BSDs? Under 20. Other thing that pisses me off is for example how polluted (at least on Ubuntu) mountpoints are. Package management is also fragmented on Linux, while on BSDs is either a flavour of `pkg` or ports. Perhaps I should still try more minimalistic Linux distributions, just don't know which are good candidates Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and still recommend it heavily to non-tech people around me but when you taste a BSD is hard to go back.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- sigio 1y ago
  Top on linux shows kernel threads (all the processes in square brackets), on BSD it doesn't show these afaik. A fresh debian install only lists a handfull of processes (all the expected ones, ssh, systemd, ntp, gettys etc) besides the 200+ kernel-threads.
  - liendolucas 1y ago
    Uh, ok then. I always thought that those were actually real kernel processes. What's the use of having top report those kernel threads? Is it possible to renice them?
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      Linux views them all as tasks, and yes you can (although I don't know if top does that).
    - BSDobelix 1y ago
      >What's the use of having top report those kernel threads? Just a different "flavor"-default-setting of top, there's not much more behind it.
boris 1y ago
What is the filesystem story in OpenBSD? Anything CoW/snapshot'able on the horizon?
- cess11 1y ago
  As I understand it, it's supported by muxfs. https://hackmd.io/EkYP__XaQRebEZDokSQNjA https://hackmd.io/EkYP__XaQRebEZDokSQNjA
_jsmh 1y ago
Must OS maintenance be this laborious?
- rfmoz 1y ago
  from what point of view are you looking for?
  - _jsmh 1y ago
    From the point of view of complexity.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
prmoustache 1y ago
What is the status on FS journaling/softupdates? I used to like openBSD but it kind of disappeared of my life once they removed support for softupdates a couple of years ago. I am not so fond of those fsck and lost data we used to have on an occasional basis after an unexpected hard shutdown due to a power cut in the 90's. Are they any new FS supported nowadays?
- daneel_w 1y ago
  Softupdates was never an approach towards journaling. It was removed because it caused more problems than it solved and because its complexity stood in the way of future work to improve FFS2. AFAIK there's currently no news about plans on getting journaling into FFS2 or bringing one of the other modern file systems onboard. The most "modern" choices you have on OpenBSD is FFS2 and ext3 (supported through OpenBSD's ext2 driver but without journaling). My own experience with FFS/FFS2 the past 20 or so years is that it's been wholly robust through the relatively few power outages and other incidents I've had. While I wouldn't mind it becoming snappier I do prefer that its fully synchronous. I've never used softupdates.
  - BSDobelix 1y ago
    >Softupdates was never an approach towards journaling. Ehmm it is a alternative approach for fs consistency then journaling: >>The use of soft updates obviates the need for a separate log or for most synchronous writes. https://www.mckusick.com/softdep/ https://www.mckusick.com/softdep/
  - grapesodaaaaa 1y ago
    FFS/FFS2 has been reliable for me, but unfortunately don’t have reliable power. It does frequently require fsck -y on boot. It’s not the most pleasant with my headless units requiring a serial cable. My solution has been a huge UPS so they never turn off. Softupdates prevented this issue for over a decade (?), so hoping we get HAMMER2 or something down the road. I’ve been running OpenBSD continuously since 3.4, and no other OS beats it in simplicity IMO. The upgrades have ticked along quickly and flawlessly year over year. I wish more systems would take a page out of that book and implement something like sysupgrade.
saagarjha 1y ago
> On Apple variants, enter DDB when exuart(4) detects a BREAK. Is this OpenBSD on Apple silicon?
- brynet 1y ago
  Yes, OpenBSD/arm64 runs on M1/M2 machines.
  - cestith 1y ago
    I understand M3 and M4 are (by some accounts gratuitously) different and harder to support. Do you know of any future plans toward those?
    - brynet 1y ago
      Unfortunately no, I don't. At the very least we'll likely need to wait for support in Asahi Linux which provides for us the m1n1 bootloader, device trees, etc., as a first-stage.
Uptrenda 1y ago
You know you're in deep when the OpenBSD release logs start to read like normal english...
kuon 1y ago
I switched my firewall to freebsd because of performances. I wonder how this release performs with mellanox cards. I still have a preference for OpenBSD.
rfmoz 1y ago
Connecting to wifi on OpenBSD terminal is wonder simple, one reflection to the meticulous work behind the system.
- ninjin 1y ago
  It really is and not just that. WireGuard being natively supported makes configuring your peers as easy as dumping the last of these example lines into /etc/hostname.wg[0-9]: https://man.openbsd.org/wg#EXAMPLES https://man.openbsd.org/wg#EXAMPLES Simple, text-file based configuration for everything in the extensive base system and no drama between upgrades is really what makes you a happy OpenBSD user.
throw0101c 1y ago
See also perhaps HTML release notes on their website (and not the CDN): * https://www.openbsd.org/78.html https://www.openbsd.org/78.html
jmclnx 1y ago
Well I know what I will be doing, I read the upgrade guide: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade78.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade78.html It is even easier then last time, no manual file removal. Easy as pie, maybe I should bake a pie during the upgrade :)
dbbr 1y ago
I currently run a PC Engines APU2 as my home firewall/router. Been doing so for years and I really like it, yet I am still an OpenBSD newb. When I ran a sysupgrade from 7.5 -> 7.6, I completely ran out of space on /usr and the upgrade utterly failed. Had to reinstall full system at that point. The issue is that my hard drive is very small and the auto format utility only allocates 1.8G to /usr. Right now, I currently have 1.5G out of 1.8G in use. On the OpenBSD mailing lists, a user asked a question that is virtually identical to the situation I am in – they are worried that if they do another sysupgrade, it will fail and they will need to reinstall. A potential solution was proposed here [0] but the process seems somewhat complex for an OpenBSD newb like me. Could anyone point me in the right direction to guides that would detail the process, which the person on the mailing list describes, that basically involves deleting /usr/obj and /usr/src and allocating that ‘saved space’ back to /usr? Thanks. [0] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=175952911527704&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=175952911527704&w=2
- cess11 1y ago
  If you look further down the thread you'll see more suggestions, I think this one would be an easier option than deleting partitions and creating a new partition mounted as /usr, since it's more or less just a change to fstab of what mounts towards which partition. https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=175957920514820&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=175957920514820&w=2
- _0xdd 1y ago
  Easier fix might be if you aren't using /usr/src (or /usr/opt) to move the contents of /usr/share/relink into /usr/src (make sure you move it, not copy, so that /usr/share/relink is empty), and then change the /usr/src mount point in /etc/fstab to /usr/share/relink. Reboot the machine and hopefully it works. If you ran out of space during the installation, you may have to repeat sysupgrade to reinstall the 7.8 sets to get all the object files where they belong.
krylon 1y ago
I run OpenBSD on two old laptops at home, two virtual machines, and one old former SOHO router/firewall appliance. So far I've upgrade all but one laptop, and once again I am impressed how painless the process is these days. And how reliable. One laptop has been running OpenBSD since 6.8-ish, and it's never given me any problems. Thank you to everyone who made this possible!
Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago
> Make vi(1) 'p' command paste in the correct place. I am really surprised to see something seemingly so simple in the changelog at this stage of development.
cybersrs 1y ago
I was wondering about installing OpenBSD on my MacBook Air with M2. I think I need to use Asahi Linux bootloader or something like that... I could not find if Wi-Fi, Sound, Bluetooth, etc will work. Please, someone let me know what is not working? I could not find one video on youtube about it.

OpenBSD 7.8

285 points by paulnpace 1y ago

mwambua 1y ago

Ooh, looks like the Raspberry Pi 5 is now supported!

miclill 1y ago
Not sure if wifi and bluetooth work though?: since: > o Implement support for "vmmc-supply" in sdhc(4), needed to power on the WiFi chip on the Raspberry Pi 5.
- cenamus 1y ago
  There's no bluetoot stack at least that part is definitely not supported
  - lproven 1y ago
    In other word, Bluetooth on Raspi is supported 100% as well as Bluetooth on all other platforms. ;-)
- brynet 1y ago
  wifi works, it's bwfm(4).

razighter777 1y ago

Great work from the OpenBSD team. Happily suprised to the continued commitment to support new hardware.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45660634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45660634

brynet 1y ago

OpenBSD 7.8 release artwork by "Apsephion" https://www.openbsd.org/images/Terraodontidae.png https://www.openbsd.org/images/Terraodontidae.png https://www.openbsd.org/images/puffy78.gif https://www.openbsd.org/images/puffy78.gif https://www.openbsd.org/78.html https://www.openbsd.org/78.html

merlincorey 1y ago
Too bad they haven't done a release song since 7.3: https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#73 https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#73

fujigawa 1y ago

The most compact, minimalist general purpose OS out there by far. Tiny memory footprint and loaded with network services built-in. Linux has become so bloated its users can't in good conscience make fun of Microsoft anymore, they are worse. Debian refuses to install with less than 512MB RAM, the text only installer will choke with less than that, it's pathetic. That's a console-only install, no GUI.

mycall 1y ago
Alpine Linux is similar in spirit to openbsd, slim and secure but perhaps with less features oobe.
- fujigawa 1y ago
  They cheat and use busybox. Meanwhile OpenBSD running all the default network services like sshd and smtpd uses < 32 MB RAM and that's with full ksh and real tools. That doesn't happen by accident.
  - argsnd 1y ago
    Is that fair? Busybox has fewer features than OpenBSD coreutils but those in turn have fewer features than GNU coreutils. All three implement the entire POSIX spec as far as I am aware.
casparvitch 1y ago
you're right, 60MB for alpine is really pushing hardware capabilities in 2025
j3th9n 1y ago
I love it you can still install the latest OpenBSD on 32MB RAM systems.
- daneel_w 1y ago
  But you can't effectively run it on that little memory, since over a decade.

citbl 1y ago

I'm surprised seeing improvements in Suspend/Hibernate support. I've used OpenBSD on laptops before and it was _fine_. I thought they primarily target servers. This feels like laptop specific improvements. Perhaps to the benefits only to those developing OpenBSD.

LeoPanthera 1y ago
The OpenBSD developers (in)famously use ThinkPads almost exclusively, so it works really great on ThinkPads, and much less well on other laptops.
- citbl 1y ago
  Incidentally it was also on a thinkpad that I had installed it. Honestly I've never owned any other laptops than thinkpads and macbooks. Every other laptop I've ever touched in a computer shop left me with "eww".
dlcarrier 1y ago
Every computer I have ever owned has regularly failed miserably at suspended, or more accurately resuming. Even my Steam Deck, with it's top down firmware and OS development regularly fails to suspend our freezes on resume.
- CSSer 1y ago
  I'll bite. You ever owned a macbook?
  - gnabgib 1y ago
    Sounds like they only thing they've owned. But maybe I'm running the perfect windows and linux distros.. and my macs are out of spec.
- masklinn 1y ago
  Apple generally has excellent sleep support, even on my old falling-to-pieces unibody which would KP if you looked at it funny I don’t remember résume ever being a concern. I’m not going to say their ever degrading software quality won’t affect that one day, and I know that some updates have caused issues for some people, but I genuinely can’t remember it ever failing me and not doing its job correctly.

president_zippy 1y ago

I'm impressed that they still maintain PA-RISC support even though HP discontinued that architecture in 2008. They maintain all these architectures in such a small, consolidated codebase with such minimal (if any) bloat. Their built-in httpd is far and away the best experience I ever had setting up a static file server for my local network, and I can't think of many times where I would ever need anything I couldn't do with the built-in FastCGI support. I'm also pleasantly surprised by how well Chicago95 (a Windows 95-style UI based on xfce) works on OpenBSD, even though the author never intended to run it on anything but xubuntu. I wouldn't recommend trying that unless you're willing to roll up your sleeves, but the payoff definitely justifies the elbow grease if you like that look and feel better than xenodm, XFCE, or GNOME.

citbl 1y ago
hmmmmm youth. I remember running windows95 overnight so that it could be a "server". The next morning, moving the mouse was making the harddrive go nuts, it was paging just by moving the cursor! Memory leak galore. This makes me want to run linux as my daily driver! [1] [1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Screenshots/SCREENSHOTS.md https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Screensho...
- pasc1878 1y ago
  Well Windows 95 was never a server. MS already had the much better NT and in those days it was not bloated.
  - microtonal 1y ago
    Yeah. When I was a high school student, we set up the new school network (end of the 90s). We used Windows NT on all the desktops and the domain/file server and SuSE Linux as a firewall/router. The whole setup was super stable and NT ran well, even on the modest desktop hardware. When we graduated, maintenance was taken over by a local consumer PC builder and had no clue experience maintaining corporate/organization networks. They replaced all desktops and servers by Windows 9x (probably 98), as it was all they knew and the network was constantly down, desktops broken/compromised, etc. NT 4.0 was a really good OS in those days for servers/work desktops. It was less great for games (though IIRC there was DirectX at some point).

zdw 1y ago

Has anyone benchmarked TCP performance now that it's outside of the global kernel lock? I wonder how useful this will be for the modest but still multicore systems used for firewalls.

daneel_w 1y ago
Network performance has gotten steadily better during the last three or so years, to the tune of most network drivers today seeing around 2x throughput compared to a few years back. I have a retired mid-2010s Celeron platform which managed about 300 Mbit/s on OpenBSD 7.1/7.2. With OpenBSD 7.6 it reached well over 700 MBit/sec. I also have an early 2020s Atom platform which saturates its 2.5GbE interface without any problems. Not all of the network drivers perform equally but the network stack improvements have all the same made them take pretty big leaps.
IcePic 1y ago
Yes, at http://bluhm.genua.de/perform/results/perform.html http://bluhm.genua.de/perform/results/perform.html (a bit down on the page) which was also mentioned during bluhm@s talk on EuroBSDCon 2025() recently. Then again, the sentence "tcp is outside of global lock" is very generalized, there are so many parts that got out of the kernel lock in pieces, like ip input, routing lookups and device packet handling that it is hard to talk about it as one singular thing that you just flip a switch on to make it MP-performant. You could make filesystem code mp, disk device drivers mp and then still run on an IDE-disk which forces all IO to be one at a time and serialized first-come-first-served at which point all the work was for 'nothing'. Same goes for networking, there are many many layers and places that all need code that actually allows for MP processing to improve its performance, fine grained locks (which reduce perf at this stage), then prove that the fine grained locks are sufficient for ALL use cases, all kinds of layering violations that could possibly happen, then you can unlock this single layer, and move to the next if nothing acts up on any machine. ) https://www.youtube.com/live/wEM-E-IJ6sY?si=X3lLX9tEIO2mcEJl&t=28256 https://www.youtube.com/live/wEM-E-IJ6sY?si=X3lLX9tEIO2mcEJl...
Arch-TK 1y ago
Not benchmarked on my system yet but I use OpenBSD on my home router (PCEngines APU2) and even before this stuff, OpenBSD could handle 1Gbit just fine. And that's with VLANs, LACP, a good number of PF rules, etc.

avadodin 1y ago

SEV and CC in general looks interesting seeing the slides. I hadn't heard of it yet. Someone more knowledgeable than me will say if these encrypted VMs are also protected from bugged modules within the SoC or on the bus besides being protected from the hypervisor. It also seems that they are adding inter-core features but I don't know whether they are related to removing locks within the kernel, embedded applications, or if they are moving to micro-kernel internally.

libroot 1y ago
No, these encrypted VMs are not protected from buggy or malicious on-die components. SEV assumes that the SoC hardware is trusted.[1] And we don't even have to go that deep: both AMD SEV and Intel's equivalent, Intel SGX, have historically been vulnerable to side-channel and speculative-execution attacks, among others, that can undermine their isolation guarantees.[2] [1]: "As with the previous SEV and SEV-ES features, under SEV-SNP the AMD System-on-Chip (SOC) hardware, the AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP), and the VM itself are all treated as fully trusted." https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/epyc-business-docs/white-papers/SEV-SNP-strengthening-vm-isolation-with-integrity-protection-and-more.pdf https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/epyc-busine... [2]: https://libroot.org/posts/trusted-execution-environments/ https://libroot.org/posts/trusted-execution-environments/
- avadodin 1y ago
  bummer nice overview article btw backdoors in the supply chain are always hard to avoid but if it can't even protect against third-party attackers including any of the hardware attached what's the point
  - all2 1y ago
    Rip-packs and drill guards are designed for running system protection. Those don't protect against compromised components, though, so select your hardware with care?

yellowapple 1y ago

Congrats on another release. Upgrading my machines went without a hitch :)

idatum 1y ago
Same.sysupgrade went flawlessly.
- anthk 1y ago
  Ditto here; upgrades are very boring under OpenBSD. You can keep the same setup for ages, even more with cwm, xterm, mupdf, mpv and a bunch of CLI/TUI tools and games...
  - yellowapple 1y ago
    The only thing I hate about how boring OpenBSD upgrades are is that I often forget that there are new features I could be exploiting for my server configs. Everything works too smoothly so I'm rarely (if ever) forced to dive into the docs to fix things.

dlevine 1y ago

When I was in the college in the early 2000s, I had a friend who ran OpenBSD. He always sang its praises, mostly because it was the most secure operating system. I tried a bunch of Linux Distributions and FreeBSD before mostly settling on MacOS, but never actually got around to running it. Glad to see OpenBSD is still being actively developed.

Flamingoat 1y ago
I used to use it at University after one of the guys I was in labs with was using it for his daily driver. The first release I tried was 3.8. It was quite a shock coming from SuSE 9.2. It was much easier to install than FreeBSD, however the installer is even more archaic than FreeBSD. Someone wrote a graphical installer years ago and but nobody bothered with it. The BSDs really need at least something like the archinstall. It is certainly different than Linux. You really need to read the FAQ and manuals as you won't find much out by doing a web search, unlike Linux. One of the other things that differs from Linux is that supported hardware / software will work, however Linux hardware support is obviously a lot better than in 2005 when I first started looking at OpenBSD.
- somat 1y ago
  Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly. When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.
  - ninjin 1y ago
    It feels like Alpine tries to imitate the OpenBSD installer somewhat as well, but it is just not the same as it forces you to make choices between SSH servers, NTP daemons, etc. So, it still very much feels like the Linux "pick and mix box". What makes OpenBSD so special is that there is one choice, it tends to be a good choice, and it is the only choice they will support and therefore they will put in the hours to make it solid.
  - 1y ago

cyberpunk 1y ago

> TCP stack is now running in parallel on multiple CPUs. This should be a nice improvement for my firewalls, some testing on the cards today me thinks.

hsjdjdbsbsjshsg 1y ago
Yeah agreed
juped 1y ago
Yeah, my home connection goes through a very low-spec protectli, but "low-spec" these days means "4 cores"...

imiric 1y ago

I'm a long-time Linux user, but have always been drawn to OpenBSD, in large part due to the team's philosophy on software. I wish I had the willpower to switch to it as my main OS, but unfortunately, my workflow is too dependent on popular software and cutting-edge hardware, which historically don't work too well on OpenBSD. I don't blame the team for it—in fact I applaud their unwavering commitment to their values. It's what makes the system great, after all. Regardless, I'm grateful that everyone can still benefit from the great set of tools that were started, and most still maintained, in the OpenBSD project. OpenSSH, PF, tmux, etc. They're a beacon of light in the software world.

ectospheno 1y ago
I use a dell laptop running openbsd as my primary computer. A proxmox server in my house runs any new hotness I need.

liendolucas 1y ago

What truly suprises me about BSDs is their simplicity and low footprint, OpenBSD being gold standard. I've been playing with `byve` the last two weeks (I highly recommend vermaden's blog for anyone interested in BSDs and obviously the handbooks of each project) and I'm seriously thinking not doing a dual boot Linux install again. On my old x230 (which is running FreeBSD) I will be installing OpenBSD just to become more familiar with it. I still don't get why just after installing Debian `top` shows me around 200 proceses. BSDs? Under 20. Other thing that pisses me off is for example how polluted (at least on Ubuntu) mountpoints are. Package management is also fragmented on Linux, while on BSDs is either a flavour of `pkg` or ports. Perhaps I should still try more minimalistic Linux distributions, just don't know which are good candidates Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and still recommend it heavily to non-tech people around me but when you taste a BSD is hard to go back.

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sigio 1y ago
Top on linux shows kernel threads (all the processes in square brackets), on BSD it doesn't show these afaik. A fresh debian install only lists a handfull of processes (all the expected ones, ssh, systemd, ntp, gettys etc) besides the 200+ kernel-threads.
- liendolucas 1y ago
  Uh, ok then. I always thought that those were actually real kernel processes. What's the use of having top report those kernel threads? Is it possible to renice them?
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    Linux views them all as tasks, and yes you can (although I don't know if top does that).
  - BSDobelix 1y ago
    >What's the use of having top report those kernel threads? Just a different "flavor"-default-setting of top, there's not much more behind it.

boris 1y ago

What is the filesystem story in OpenBSD? Anything CoW/snapshot'able on the horizon?

cess11 1y ago
As I understand it, it's supported by muxfs. https://hackmd.io/EkYP__XaQRebEZDokSQNjA https://hackmd.io/EkYP__XaQRebEZDokSQNjA

_jsmh 1y ago

Must OS maintenance be this laborious?

rfmoz 1y ago
from what point of view are you looking for?
- _jsmh 1y ago
  From the point of view of complexity.
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prmoustache 1y ago

What is the status on FS journaling/softupdates? I used to like openBSD but it kind of disappeared of my life once they removed support for softupdates a couple of years ago. I am not so fond of those fsck and lost data we used to have on an occasional basis after an unexpected hard shutdown due to a power cut in the 90's. Are they any new FS supported nowadays?

daneel_w 1y ago
Softupdates was never an approach towards journaling. It was removed because it caused more problems than it solved and because its complexity stood in the way of future work to improve FFS2. AFAIK there's currently no news about plans on getting journaling into FFS2 or bringing one of the other modern file systems onboard. The most "modern" choices you have on OpenBSD is FFS2 and ext3 (supported through OpenBSD's ext2 driver but without journaling). My own experience with FFS/FFS2 the past 20 or so years is that it's been wholly robust through the relatively few power outages and other incidents I've had. While I wouldn't mind it becoming snappier I do prefer that its fully synchronous. I've never used softupdates.
- BSDobelix 1y ago
  >Softupdates was never an approach towards journaling. Ehmm it is a alternative approach for fs consistency then journaling: >>The use of soft updates obviates the need for a separate log or for most synchronous writes. https://www.mckusick.com/softdep/ https://www.mckusick.com/softdep/
- grapesodaaaaa 1y ago
  FFS/FFS2 has been reliable for me, but unfortunately don’t have reliable power. It does frequently require fsck -y on boot. It’s not the most pleasant with my headless units requiring a serial cable. My solution has been a huge UPS so they never turn off. Softupdates prevented this issue for over a decade (?), so hoping we get HAMMER2 or something down the road. I’ve been running OpenBSD continuously since 3.4, and no other OS beats it in simplicity IMO. The upgrades have ticked along quickly and flawlessly year over year. I wish more systems would take a page out of that book and implement something like sysupgrade.

saagarjha 1y ago

> On Apple variants, enter DDB when exuart(4) detects a BREAK. Is this OpenBSD on Apple silicon?

brynet 1y ago
Yes, OpenBSD/arm64 runs on M1/M2 machines.
- cestith 1y ago
  I understand M3 and M4 are (by some accounts gratuitously) different and harder to support. Do you know of any future plans toward those?
  - brynet 1y ago
    Unfortunately no, I don't. At the very least we'll likely need to wait for support in Asahi Linux which provides for us the m1n1 bootloader, device trees, etc., as a first-stage.

Uptrenda 1y ago

You know you're in deep when the OpenBSD release logs start to read like normal english...

kuon 1y ago

I switched my firewall to freebsd because of performances. I wonder how this release performs with mellanox cards. I still have a preference for OpenBSD.

rfmoz 1y ago

Connecting to wifi on OpenBSD terminal is wonder simple, one reflection to the meticulous work behind the system.

ninjin 1y ago
It really is and not just that. WireGuard being natively supported makes configuring your peers as easy as dumping the last of these example lines into /etc/hostname.wg[0-9]: https://man.openbsd.org/wg#EXAMPLES https://man.openbsd.org/wg#EXAMPLES Simple, text-file based configuration for everything in the extensive base system and no drama between upgrades is really what makes you a happy OpenBSD user.

throw0101c 1y ago

See also perhaps HTML release notes on their website (and not the CDN): * https://www.openbsd.org/78.html https://www.openbsd.org/78.html

jmclnx 1y ago

Well I know what I will be doing, I read the upgrade guide: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade78.html https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade78.html It is even easier then last time, no manual file removal. Easy as pie, maybe I should bake a pie during the upgrade :)

dbbr 1y ago

I currently run a PC Engines APU2 as my home firewall/router. Been doing so for years and I really like it, yet I am still an OpenBSD newb. When I ran a sysupgrade from 7.5 -> 7.6, I completely ran out of space on /usr and the upgrade utterly failed. Had to reinstall full system at that point. The issue is that my hard drive is very small and the auto format utility only allocates 1.8G to /usr. Right now, I currently have 1.5G out of 1.8G in use. On the OpenBSD mailing lists, a user asked a question that is virtually identical to the situation I am in – they are worried that if they do another sysupgrade, it will fail and they will need to reinstall. A potential solution was proposed here [0] but the process seems somewhat complex for an OpenBSD newb like me. Could anyone point me in the right direction to guides that would detail the process, which the person on the mailing list describes, that basically involves deleting /usr/obj and /usr/src and allocating that ‘saved space’ back to /usr? Thanks. [0] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=175952911527704&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=175952911527704&w=2

cess11 1y ago
If you look further down the thread you'll see more suggestions, I think this one would be an easier option than deleting partitions and creating a new partition mounted as /usr, since it's more or less just a change to fstab of what mounts towards which partition. https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=175957920514820&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=175957920514820&w=2
_0xdd 1y ago
Easier fix might be if you aren't using /usr/src (or /usr/opt) to move the contents of /usr/share/relink into /usr/src (make sure you move it, not copy, so that /usr/share/relink is empty), and then change the /usr/src mount point in /etc/fstab to /usr/share/relink. Reboot the machine and hopefully it works. If you ran out of space during the installation, you may have to repeat sysupgrade to reinstall the 7.8 sets to get all the object files where they belong.

krylon 1y ago

I run OpenBSD on two old laptops at home, two virtual machines, and one old former SOHO router/firewall appliance. So far I've upgrade all but one laptop, and once again I am impressed how painless the process is these days. And how reliable. One laptop has been running OpenBSD since 6.8-ish, and it's never given me any problems. Thank you to everyone who made this possible!

Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago

> Make vi(1) 'p' command paste in the correct place. I am really surprised to see something seemingly so simple in the changelog at this stage of development.

cybersrs 1y ago

I was wondering about installing OpenBSD on my MacBook Air with M2. I think I need to use Asahi Linux bootloader or something like that... I could not find if Wi-Fi, Sound, Bluetooth, etc will work. Please, someone let me know what is not working? I could not find one video on youtube about it.