In a recent entry on his blog, OpenBSD developer Ted Unangst (tedu@) asks, is OpenBSD 10x faster than Linux?. He explains,

Here’s a little benchmark complements of Jann Horn. It’s unexpectedly slow on Linux. OpenBSD is so fast, I had to modify the program slightly to measure itself, as the time utility is missing sufficient precision to even record nonzero.

Go on, read the rest over at Ted's blog for some fun tidbits on performance and benchmarks.

OpenBSD users and aficionados are more likely than others to be familiar with the concept of greytrapping (the nastier kid sister of greylisting), as implemented via the OpenBSD spamd(8) spammer taunting software.

The feature has now been around for 18 years, and undeadly.org co-editor Peter Hansteen found that and another milestone to be a good reason to write a retrospective:

Friends, it finally happened. On August 7th, 2025, the number of spamtraps intended to woo the unwary spammer rolled past the number of inhabitants in my home country of Norway. It's time for a retrospective.

So I wrote up one: Eighteen Years of Greytrapping - Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off? (also available with G's trackers here) is a retrospective article with data and graphs.

That's right, we've been making life harder for spammers for 18 years. Peter's writeup has links to data, and more field notes and war stories than he could actually remember writing when he started on the retrospective.

We have long been aware that OpenBSD and OpenSSH in general are at the very forefront of cryptography engineering.

A recent data point here is that Damien Miller (djm@) just committed a new OpenSSH Post-Quantum Cryptography FAQ page to the OpenSSH web site:

List:       openbsd-cvs
Subject:    CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: www
From:       Damien Miller <djm () cvs ! openbsd ! org>
Date:       2025-08-11 5:26:51

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	www
Changes by:	djm@cvs.openbsd.org	2025/08/10 23:26:51

Added files:
	openssh        : pq.html 

A new opportunity for you to help improve the upcoming OpenBSD 7.8 release has turned up. If YOU have a USB webcam you are using or would like to use with our favorite operating system, Kirill Korinsky (kirill@) would like to hear from you after testing recent snapshots.

Kirill's message to misc@ reads:

Subject:    Call for testing: USB webcams
From:       Kirill A. Korinsky <kirill () korins ! ky>
Date:       2025-08-06 13:27:31

misc@,

the latest snapshots for amd64 and arm64 (I haven't checked other
architectures) include my recent changes to add support for H.264 streams
from USB webcams.

Development of important software sometimes happens without fanfare. If not for one of our editors noticing by watching commits, we would have missed the fact that Damien Miller (djm@) recently added a couple of notable features to OpenSSH:

The WiFI 802.11 standards are a gnarly lot, and checking for compatibility of the various sub-specifications has been known to drive even seasoned OpenBSD developers to the brink of distraction.

Now Stefan Sperling (stsp@) is airing a possible improvement in compatibility checks via a message to tech@ titled "fix net80211 802.11g compatibility check", saying

List:       openbsd-tech
Subject:    fix net80211 802.11g compatibility check
From:       Stefan Sperling <stsp () stsp ! name>
Date:       2025-07-31 10:26:18

I have a WIP fix for qwx which relies on ieee80211_iserp_sta() to
detect whether an AP supports 802.11g, rather than 802.11b only.

And I encountered an access point which qwx could not connect to when
my WIP fix is applied.

Much longed for by some, remembered as a quaint memory by other greybeards, the classic Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is being added to the ports collection.

The initial commit message reads,

List:       openbsd-ports-cvs
Subject:    CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: ports
From:       Antoine Jacoutot <ajacoutot () cvs ! openbsd ! org>
Date:       2025-07-28 12:35:38

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	ports
Changes by:	ajacoutot@cvs.openbsd.org	2025/07/28 06:35:38

Log message:
    Import cde-2.5.2
    
    CDE - The Common Desktop Environment is X Windows desktop environment that was
    commonly used on commercial UNIX variants such as Sun Solaris, HP-UX and IBM
    AIX. Developed between 1993 and 1999, it has now been released under an Open
    Source licence by The Open Group.

Version 0.116 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated):

• make our pack-refs header format align with the expectations of git 2.50.0
• fix bogus "bad offset in pack file" errors wrongly raised by gotd
• fix gotd branch protection rejecting commits that already exist on server
• pick a default branch to clone when the server does not advertise HEAD symref
• do not clobber changes staged via stage -p during "got revert"
• enforce additional restrictions on reference names specified in gotsys.conf
• change gotwebd favicons to show the smiley fish only
• fix gotd reload when /etc/gotd-secrets.conf is used
• fix bogus "raw object has unexpected size" errors during deltification
• fix bug in delta block stretch size calculation resulting in invalid deltas
• fix gotsysd behaviour when the anonymous user is removed from gotsys.conf
• add support for email and http/json notifications to gotsysd and gotsys.conf

In a recent blog post When Root Meets Immutable: OpenBSD chflags vs. Log Tampering, Rafael Sadowski (rsadowski@) takes a deep dive into an infrequently mentioned feature of our favorite operating system: file immutability and the chflags command. From the article:

" ... anyone who’s ever had to investigate a security incident knows the harsh reality: logs are only as trustworthy as their protection against post-incident tampering. An attacker who gains root access isn’t going to politely leave their tracks in the log files – unless they physically can’t alter them anymore."

Read the whole thing, When Root Meets Immutable: OpenBSD chflags vs. Log Tampering, over at Rafael's site!