The release of the free UNIX-like operating system OpenBSD 7.9 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-source operating system based on the source code tree of NetBSD, with the main goals of development being portability (supporting 13 hardware platforms), standardization, correctness, proactive security, and integrated cryptographic tools. The size of the complete installation ISO image of the base system OpenBSD 7.9 is 762 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 7.9 is the 60th release of the project. Main changes:
- In the task scheduler for amd64 and arm64 architectures, a mechanism has been implemented to manage CPU core usage based on their performance. To exclude certain types of cores during scheduler operation, a sysctl variable 'hw.blockcpu' has been proposed, accepting flags: S to exclude logical cores (SMT), P for regular cores, E for energy-efficient cores (20-50% slower), and L for throttled cores (the slowest). The default value is set to SL.
- The possibility of delayed hibernation has been implemented to prevent complete battery drain during sleep mode. The essence of the mechanism is that initially, the system is put into sleep mode, where the RAM remains active, and stays in that state for a duration specified by the sysctl variable machdep.hibernatedelay. After this time has elapsed, the system wakes up and immediately enters hibernation mode, where the contents of the RAM are saved to permanent storage.
- The implementation of the Direct Rendering Manager (drm) framework and graphics drivers for AMD and Intel GPUs has been synchronized with the Linux kernel 6.18.22 (previously 6.12.50).
- Support has been added for operating as a guest OS in virtualization systems based on Apple Hypervisor. OpenBSD builds for the arm64 architecture can be used in virtual machines macOS on devices with Apple Silicon ARM chips.
- A miniature vmboot kernel has been added, allowing the initialization of an environment for a virtual machine based on the vmd hypervisor after an update via sysupgrade.
- PCI drivers now have the ability to change their power consumption state, utilized in the xhci driver for entering low power mode and putting the accompanying USB4 controller into sleep mode.
- A basic implementation of the low-level FUSE API has been added, sufficient for compiling and running the lowntfs-3g driver.
- Support for Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) has been added.
- Support for new hardware has been expanded, adding drivers for USB4 controllers, Cadence PCIe controllers, Qualcomm SC7280, Qualcomm GENI UART, Intel LPSS SPI controller, and Quectel EC200A LTE modem.
- On amd64 systems, the ability to load files with the kernel from the EFI partition has been added, allowing the bootloader and bsd.rd to be placed in the EFI partition for initiating the installer.
- The __pledge_open system call has been added, allowing libc to open certain essential files, such as the pseudo-random number generator device and timezone database, even when pledge and unveil mechanisms prohibit this. Files opened this way are accessible only in read mode, and write, chmod, chflags, chown, ftruncate, and fdpassing functions are prohibited for them.
- The virtual Ethernet bridge (veb) network device now supports VLAN.
- Automatic IPv6 configuration (SLAAC) is enabled by default.
- OpenSSH, LibreSSL, and OpenBGPD have been updated. The change logs can be found in the announcements for OpenSSH 10.3, LibreSSL 4.3, and OpenBGPD 9.1.
- The number of ports for the AMD64 architecture is now 13044 (up from 12651), for aarch64 it's 12883 (up from 12506), and for i386 it's 10631 (up from 10457). Among the application versions in the ports are:
- Asterisk 22.9.0
- Audacity 3.7.7
- CMake 4.2.3
- Chromium 147.0.7727.101
- Emacs 30.2
- FFmpeg 8.0.1
- GCC 15.2.0
- GNOME 49
- Go 1.26.2
- JDK 25.0.2
- KDE Gear 25.12.3, KDE Frameworks 6.23.0, KDE Plasma 6.6.4
- Krita 5.2.16
- LLVM/Clang 21.1.8
- LibreOffice 26.2.2.2
- Lua 5.4.8
- MariaDB 11.4.10
- Mono 6.14.1
- Firefox 150.0
- Thunderbird 140.10.0
- Node.js 22.22.2
- OpenLDAP 2.6.13
- PHP 8.5.5
- Postfix 3.11.1
- PostgreSQL 18.3
- Python 3.13.13
- Qt 6.10.2
- Ruby 4.0.2
- Rust 1.94.1
- SQLite 3.51.3
- Shotcut 26.2.26
- Sudo 1.9.17p2
- Suricata 7.0.7
- Tcl/Tk 9.0.3
- Vulkan 1.4.341.0
- Wayland 1.24.0 with compositors servers Labwc, Mango, Niri, Sway, and Wayfire.
- Xfce 4.20.0
- Updated third-party components included in OpenBSD 7.9:
- The Xenocara graphics stack based on X.Org 7.7 with xserver 21.1.21 + patches, freetype 2.14.2, fontconfig 2.17.1, Mesa 25.0.7, xterm 406, xkeyboard-config 2.20, fonttosfnt 1.2.4.
- LLVM/Clang 19.1.7 (+ patches)
- GCC 4.2.1 (+ patches)
- Perl 5.42.2 (+ patches)
- NSD 4.14.2
- Unbound 1.24.2 (this version contains a critical vulnerability in the DNSSEC implementation that allows remote code execution).
- Ncurses 6.4
- Binutils 2.17 (+ patches)
- Gdb 6.3 (+ patches)
- Awk 20250116
- Expat 2.7.5
- zlib 1.3.2 (+ patches)
Source: opennet.ru
