The release of the free UNIX-like operating system OpenBSD 7.8 has been announced. The OpenBSD project was founded by Theo de Raadt in 1995 after a conflict with the developers of NetBSD, which resulted in Theo being denied access to the NetBSD CVS repository. Following this, Theo de Raadt and a group of like-minded individuals created a new open operating system based on the NetBSD source code tree, with the main development goals being portability (supporting 13 hardware platforms), standardization, correctness, proactive security, and integrated cryptographic tools. The size of the full installation ISO image of the basic OpenBSD 7.8 system is 597 MB.
In addition to the operating system itself, the OpenBSD project is known for its components, which have been adopted in other systems and established themselves as some of the safest and highest-quality solutions. Among them are: LibreSSL (a fork of OpenSSL), OpenSSH, the packet filter PF, the OpenBGPD and OpenOSPFD routing daemons, the OpenNTPD NTP server, mail server OpenSMTPD, terminal multiplexer (similar to GNU screen) tmux, the identd daemon implementing the IDENT protocol, BSDL alternative to the GNU groff package — mandoc, protocol for organizing fault-tolerant systems CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol), lightweight HTTP server, and file synchronization utility OpenRSYNC. server Support for Raspberry Pi 5 boards has been added in the port for the ARM64 architecture, the acpicpu driver has been implemented, and apm (Advanced Power Management) and sysctl hw.cpuspeed are operational on devices with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips.
Key Changes:
- Support for the FD_CLOFORK (close-on-fork) flag has been implemented to close the file descriptor for child processes after calling the fork() function. Compared to other implementations, this flag is reset after calling the exec() function for security and convenience reasons.
- A subsystem for performing high-level memory allocation, scheduling, and dispatching software interrupts (soft interrupt dispatcher) has been added.
- The kernel has been switched to using nanoseconds instead of timer ticks when executing the sleep function, which helps avoid loss of precision due to conversions from nanoseconds to ticks and back when initiating operations from library functions in user space.
- The kernel has been translated to use nanoseconds instead of timer ticks when executing the sleep function, which helps to avoid loss of precision due to the conversions from nanoseconds to ticks and back when initiating operations from library functions in user space.
- Compatibility with FUSE-based file systems (Filesystem in Userspace) has been enhanced, utilizing the libfuse library in its implementations.
- Support for sleep and suspend modes has been improved. Pre-allocation of working space for sleep mode during boot has been ensured. Added the ability to use suspend mode when connecting devices via GPIO. Support for suspending laptops with AMD CPUs using the low power consumption mode S0ix has been added. The sysctl ddb.suspend has been implemented, allowing the bypassing of suspend mode for the inteldrm and amdgpu drivers, keeping the screen active. Reliability of S3 suspend mode operation has been increased when using the amdgpu graphics driver.
- Improved support for multiprocessor systems (SMP). TCP stack processing has been parallelized across different CPU cores. Up to 8 threads can now be used for handling TCP traffic and incoming network packets (but no more than CPU cores). Parallel execution of IPv6 packet reassembly operations and routing parameter parsing has been implemented. Removed global locking in the system calls close() and listen().
- The Direct Rendering Manager (drm) framework has been synchronized with Linux kernel 6.12.50 (previous release was 6.12.21). New drivers qcdrm and qcdpc for the DRM subsystem of Qualcomm Snapdragon chips and the Qualcomm DisplayPort controller have been added.
- Support for OpenBSD operation in virtual machines kvm/qemu has been implemented, utilizing the AMD SEV-ES (Encrypted State) extension for guest system protection. The vmd hypervisor has been updated to allow guest systems to run in AMD SEV-ES mode, with the addition of the 'seves' parameter in vm.conf. Emulated Virtio devices network, block, entropy, and scsi have been updated to support the Virtio 1.2 specification.
- The pkg-config utility has been transitioned from its custom implementation in Perl to the use of the pkgconf 2.4.3 toolset, written in C.
- The iwatch program has been utilized as a watch utility, periodically executing commands and displaying their output.
- The security script, which performs periodic security checks, has had functionality added for creating GPT/MBR backups. An option '-R' has been added to the fdisk utility for restoring GPT/MBR from a file.
- The background process apmd has been added with the option "-w percentage" and handler /etc/apm/warnlow to issue a warning when the battery charge drops below the specified level.
- A new profiling system gprof has been implemented, utilizing the system call profil.
- Hardware support has been expanded and new drivers have been added:
- acpiwmi — Windows Management Instrumentation.
- amdpmc — AMD power management controller.
- bcmmip — MSI BCM2712 controller.
- bcmstbgpio — Broadcom GPIO controller.
- bcmstbintc — Broadcom interrupt controller.
- bcmstbpinctrl — Broadcom pin multiplexing.
- bcmstbrescal — Broadcom reset calibration controller.
- bcmstbreset — Broadcom reset controller.
- rpone — Raspberry Pi RP1 peripheral controller.
- rpiclock — Raspberry Pi RP1 clock controller.
- rpipwm — Raspberry Pi RP1 PWM controller.
- rpirtc — Raspberry Pi real-time clock.
- iasuskbd(4) — ASUS I2C HID.
- Support for the H.264 codec has been added to the uvideo webcam driver.
- A background process lldpd has been added implementing the LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol) protocols and the lldp utility for managing it.
- A background process bpflogd has been added to capture network packets using bpf (Berkeley Packet Filter) and log them in tcpdump format.
- In iked, the IKEv2 protocol implementation for IPsec, support for loading multiple certificates from a file has been added.
- The LibreSSL library has been updated to version 4.2.0, which offers an API for using the ML-KEM (CRYSTALS-Kyber) key exchange algorithm, resistant to quantum computing attacks.
- OpenSSH has been updated. The change log can be found in the announcements for OpenSSH 10.1 and 10.2:
- The number of ports for AMD64 architecture has reached 12651 (up from 12593), for aarch64 — 12506 (up from 12446), for i386 — 10457 (up from 10429). Among the application versions in the ports:
- Asterisk 22.5.2
- Audacity 3.7.5
- CMake 3.31.8
- Chromium 141.0.7390.54
- Emacs 30.2
- FFmpeg 6.1.3
- GCC 8.4.0 and 11.2.0
- GHC 9.8.3
- GNOME 48
- Go 1.25.1
- JDK 8u462, 11.0.28, 17.0.16, 21.0.8 and 25.0.0
- KDE Applications 25.08.1
- KDE Frameworks 6.18.0
- KDE Plasma 6.4.5
- Krita 5.2.13
- LLVM/Clang 19.1.7, 20.1.8 and 21.1.2
- LibreOffice 25.8.1.1
- Lua 5.1.5, 5.2.4, 5.3.6 and 5.4.7
- MariaDB 11.4.7
- Mono 6.12.0.199
- Mozilla Firefox 143.0.3 and ESR 140.3.1
- Mozilla Thunderbird 143.3.1
- Mutt 2.2.15 and NeoMutt 20250905
- Node.js 22.20.0
- OCaml 4.14.2
- OpenLDAP 2.6.10
- PHP 8.2.29, 8.3.26 and 8.4.13
- Postfix 3.5.25 and 3.10.1
- PostgreSQL 17.6
- Python 2.7.18 and 3.12.11
- Qt 5.15.16 (+ patches from kde) and 6.8.3
- R 4.5.1
- Ruby 3.2.9, 3.3.9 and 3.4.6
- Rust 1.90.0
- SQLite 3.50.4
- Shotcut 25.08.16
- Sudo 1.9.17p2
- Suricata 7.0.7
- Tcl/Tk 8.5.19 and 8.6.16
- TeX Live 2025
- Vim 9.1.1706 and Neovim 0.11.4
- Xfce 4.20.0
- Components from third-party developers included in OpenBSD 7.8 have been updated:
- The Xenocara graphics stack based on X.Org 7.7 with xserver 21.1.18 + patches, freetype 2.13.3, fontconfig 2.15.0, Mesa 25.0.7, xterm 399, xkeyboard-config 2.20, fonttosfnt 1.2.4.
- LLVM/Clang 19.1.7 (+ patches)
- GCC 4.2.1 (+ patches) and 3.3.6 (+ patches)
- Perl 5.40.1 (+ patches)
- NSD 4.3.0
- Unbound 1.24.0
- Ncurses 6.4
- Binutils 2.17 (+ patches)
- Gdb 6.3 (+ patches)
- Awk 20250116
- Expat 2.7.3
- zlib 1.3.1 (+ patches)
Source: opennet.ru
