The release of the free UNIX-like operating system OpenBSD 8.0 has been announced. The OpenBSD project was founded by Theo de Raadt in 1995 after a conflict with the NetBSD developers, resulting in Theo losing access to the NetBSD CVS repository. Following this, Theo de Raadt, along with a group of like-minded individuals, created a new open operating system based on the NetBSD source tree, with main goals focused on portability (supporting 13 hardware platforms), standardization, correctness, proactive security, and integrated cryptographic support. The size of the full installation ISO image of the OpenBSD 8.0 base system is 794 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.
OpenBSD 8.0 has become the 61st release of the project. The significant change in version number is due to the use of decimal numbering, where version 8.0 follows after release 7.9. Key changes include:
- For the amd64 architecture, the size of the kernel-addressable virtual address space has increased from 4 GB to 512 GB. The pmap module has implemented randomization of the base address for the direct mapping of all physical memory to virtual addresses.
- On arm64 architecture systems, support for sleep mode with memory content saved to disk (hibernate) has been implemented.
- Support for bounce buffers has been added for arm64 and riscv64 architectures, which are used when direct addressing of all memory from the device transmitting data in DMA mode is not possible.
- To accelerate the encryption of data in the swap partition on amd64 and arm64 systems, CPU AES instructions are utilized.
- For the riscv64 architecture, support for detecting CPU extensions has been implemented, allowing this information to be passed to user space (data can be obtained using the AT_HWCAP and AT_HWCAP2 flags in the elf_aux_info function).
Support has been added for the 'V' extension (vector operations), Sstc (timer operations), and AIA (Advanced Interrupt Architecture, interrupt handling), along with the imsi and aplic drivers for the corresponding interrupt controllers. - The port for the sparc64 architecture has been transitioned to use the LLVM toolchain.
- Support for the hardware platform Loongson, added in 2010 for MIPS-compatible Chinese processors Loongson 2E and 2F, has been discontinued. The removal was due to assembly issues for the mips64el platform in new versions of the Clang compiler.
- The implementation of the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) framework and graphics drivers for AMD (radeondrm, amdgpu) and Intel GPUs is synchronized with the Linux kernel 6.18.53 (the previous release was 6.18.22). Support for Intel Arc A series graphics cards (DG2/Alchemist) has been transferred to the inteldrm driver. Issues related to timeouts on systems with Intel Alder Lake GPUs have been resolved. Support for addressing more than 4 GB of video memory has been added.
- The kernel has improved heuristic processing of inactive memory pages during swapping to the swap space and memory release. A getexecpath function has been added to determine the absolute path to the executable file of the current process. Preparation for increasing the size of disk labels (disklabel) has been conducted.
- Support for sleep mode has been expanded, now correctly supported in drivers qwz (Qualcomm Wi-Fi 7 IEEE 802.11a/ac/ax/b/g/n), ufshci (Universal Flash Storage Host Controller), and qcuart (Qualcomm GENI UART). These changes have resolved issues with transitioning into sleep mode on laptops and tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, HONOR MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon, and IdeaPad. A global variable for transitioning into sleep mode has been added, separating hibernation and standby modes.
- Support for multiprocessing has been introduced in the vmd hypervisor virtual machines with the ability to use up to 64 virtual CPUs. For guest systems, x2apic mode has been implemented, as well as lapic and ioapic modes for running 32-bit guest systems with Linux. Work with qcow image formats has been improved.
- In audio, server sndiod has implemented a server mode of control, allowing dynamic changes to settings via the sndioctl utility. The sndioctl tool now supports adding and removing list elements, as well as configuring MIDI port passthrough.
- Support for hardware has been expanded, and new drivers have been added for
Intel E610 Ethernet controllers, Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake, GXTP7936 touchscreens (Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge), SpacemiT K3 PCIe controllers, SABI (Samsung Advanced BIOS Interface), Samsung charging controllers, Rockchip OTP memory, AMD APU 'Krackan Point', SpacemiT K3 SoC, and Qualcomm Glymur (X2). Numerous improvements have been made to the qwx driver (Qualcomm Wi-Fi 6 IEEE 802.11a/ac/ax/b/g/n). - Support for masks when specifying alternative names has been added to acme-client.
- Tmux now features a frame-less menu display mode, enhanced UTF-8 support, a new command 'T' to change the pane title, added refresh-now command, support for modal panes (-O) in the new-pane command, and the '–K' flag for handling all keypresses in modal panes. Flags '-H' and '-L' have been added to the capture-pane command to display hyperlinks and line numbers.
- LibreSSL has improved compatibility with AIX, FreeBSD, macOS, MinGW, NetBSD, and Windows, as well as enhanced support for assembly language code across different platforms. The API dtls12_handshake_msg has been added. SHA-3 performance has been increased.
- OpenSSH has been updated, and the change log can be viewed in the announcements.
OpenSSH 10.4,
OpenSSH 10.5 and
OpenSSH 10.6. - The number of ports for the AMD64 architecture has reached 13060 (previously 13044), for aarch64 — 12907 (previously 12883), and for i386 — 10659 (previously 10631). Among the application versions in ports are:
- Asterisk 20.21.0 and 22.11.0
- Audacity 3.7.9
- CMake 4.3.5
- Chromium 154.0.8037.92
- Emacs 31.1
- FFmpeg 9.0.2
- GCC 16.1.0
- GHC 9.10.3
- GNOME 49
- Go 1.27.1
- JDK 11.0.32, 17.0.20, 21.0.12, and 25.0.4
- KDE Plasma 6.7.5, KDE Gear 26.08.1, KDE Frameworks 6.30.0
- Krita 6.0.3
- LLVM/Clang 21.1.8 and 22.1.8
- LibreOffice 26.8.0.3
- Lua 5.1.5, 5.2.4, 5.3.6, 5.4.8, and 5.5.1
- MariaDB 12.3.3
- Mono 6.14.1
- Mozilla Firefox 157.0 and ESR 153.4.0
- Mozilla Thunderbird 153.4.0
- Mutt 2.4.2 and NeoMutt 20260616
- Node.js 24.21.0 and Deno 2.9.7
- OCaml 4.14.2
- OpenLDAP 2.6.15
- PHP 8.3.33, 8.4.26, and 8.5.11
- Postfix 3.5.28 and 3.11.7
- PostgreSQL 18.6
- Python 2.7.18 and 3.14.7
- Qt 5.15.19 (+ patches from KDE) and 6.11.2
- R 4.6.1
- Ruby 3.3.12, 3.4.11, and 4.0.7
- Rust 1.98.1
- SQLite 3.53.2
- Shotcut 26.8.1
- Sudo 1.9.17p2
- Suricata 7.0.7
- Tcl/Tk 8.5.19, 8.6.18, and 9.0.4
- TeX Live 2026
- Vim 9.2.1125, Neovim 0.12.5, and Vim-Classic 2026091
- Wayland 1.26.0 and composite managers CoW, Labwc, Mango, Niri, Sway, Wayfire
- Vulkan 1.4.357.0
- Xfce 4.20.0
- Updated third-party components included in OpenBSD 8.0:
- Xenocara graphical stack based on X.Org 7.7 with xserver 21.1.24 + patches, freetype 2.14.3, fontconfig 2.17.1, Mesa 25.0.7, xterm 410, xkeyboard-config 2.20, fonttosfnt 1.2.5.
- LLVM/Clang 22.1.6 (+ patches)
- GCC 4.2.1 (+ patches)
- Perl 5.42.3 (+ patches)
- NSD 4.15.2.
- Unbound 1.26.1.
- Ncurses 6.4
- Binutils 2.17 (+ patches)
- Gdb 6.3 (+ patches)
- Awk 20250116
- Expat 2.8.4
- zlib 1.3.2 (+ patches)
- Vulnerabilities fixed: buffer overflow in ppp, remote code execution in DNS server nsd (CVE-2026-101337, CVE-2026-101338, CVE-2026-101339, CVE-2026-101341), remote buffer overflow in IPsec when using AES-GMAC, and access to freed memory in the implementation of /dev/video.
Source: opennet.ru
