2019-04-24, Calgary, Alberta, Canada and elsewhere: With a message sent to relevant mailing lists, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) announced that the OpenBSD project's 46th release, OpenBSD 6.5 is now generally available from mirror sites all over the world.

Notable changes include but are not limited to:

• On amd64 and i386 platforms, the default linker has been changed to lld.
• The radeonsi Mesa driver (for hardware acceleration on Southern Islands and Sea Islands radeondrm(4) devices) has been added.
• pvclock(4), a driver for the KVM paravirtual clock, has been added.
• Support for isochronous transfers has been added to xhci(4).
• The (replacement) uaudio(4) driver now supports USB audio class v2.0.
• There have been numerous improvement in both the IEEE 802.11 wireless and generic network stacks.
• unveil(2) has been improved considerably, and pledge(2) has gained a new "video" promise.
• RETGUARD has replaced the stack-protector on amd64 and arm64 architectures.
• The new pthread rwlock implementation has improved the latency of threaded applications.
• Xorg(1), the X window server, is no longer installed setuid.
• bgpd(8) has been enhanced considerably.
• openrsync(1), rdsetroot(8), and unwind(8) have been added.

For a fuller description, see the OpenBSD 6.5 release page or the detailed changelog of changes since the previous release.

See also the Upgrade Guide.

After doing active development on it for about a month, i just released version 1.0.0 of the DocBook to mdoc converter, docbook2mdoc(1). The OpenBSD port was updated, too. In a nutshell, docbook2mdoc was brought from experimental status to an early release that can be considered mostly usable for production, though no doubt there are still many rough edges. That's why i called it 1.0.0 and not 1.1.1.

The stream of t2k19 hackathon reports continues with this from Christian Weisgerber (naddy@):

Discounting an airport layover, this was my first trip to Asia. I guess I picked the right spot. Seeing Taipei felt like stepping into Ghost in the Shell. Awesome. But this isn't the OpenBSD travel blog…

Fresh from the recent t2k19 hackathon in Taipei, Florian Obser (florian@) writes in with this report:

unwind(8) is weird. It is the first daemon I wrote without having a constant use for most of its features. slowcgi(8), slaacd(8) and rad(8) are different, I use them every day and I will notice when I break stuff.

A new hackathon report has arrived, this time from Stefan Sperling (stsp@), who writes:

This hackathon was an exceptional opportunity for several developers involved in 802.11 wireless to meet face to face. I spent a lot of time collaborating with Kevin Lo and Jonathan Matthew throughout the week.

Kenneth R Westerback (krw@) wrote in with a report on his recent participation in t2k19:

Rule 1 of Taipei travel -- nobody knows what an EasyCard is.

Fresh from the t2k19 hackathon comes a report from Anthony J. Bentley (bentley@), who writes:

Seeing an Asia hackathon coming up was pretty exciting; I’d never been there before. I spent a month or so preparing by getting through the more mundane things in my backlog, mostly new ports and updates. That left my time in Taipei open to focus on fixing some bugs and broken things.

Ken Westerback (krw@) writes in with his report from a2k19, the hackathon in New Zealand:

Due to an earlier (pre-737Max) airplane problem on the flight back from n2k18 in Usti nad Labem, a loosely worded compensation coupon and the cooperation of beck@ in exploiting said wording, I was able to fly Business Class over the Pacific and thus arrived well rested in BNE. Could have been even more rested if I hadn't had to rouse myself to raise a(nother) glass of champagne as we crossed the date line and it became someone's birthday. First world problems.

The alert reader will have noted that BNE is not where a2k19 was. But beck@ and I had decided to personally drag various Australians onto the flight to Wellington the next day.

Ingo Schwarze wrote in with the announcement of a new mandoc release. Ingo writes,

I just released mandoc-1.14.5. This is a regular maintenance release. As structural changes are quite limited, i expect it to be very stable, so all downstream systems are encouraged to upgrade from any earlier version.