Right on the heels of the previous announcement, Kenneth R. Westerback (krw@) of the OpenBSD Foundation writes to inform us:

The OpenBSD Foundation is happy to announce that individual contributions from the OpenBSD commnunity have again exceeded $100,000, making the community the 2nd Iridium level donor for 2018!

These smaller regular contributions are the backbone of longer term spending planning. The Foundation would like to thank all the individuals who made and continue to make regular monthly contributions.

We'd like to thank Ken for sharing this piece of good news, and join him in thanking the larger community for their donations. If you haven't already (or want to add a donation), you can visit the donations page of the Foundation to make a contribution too.

On his blog, joshua stein (jcs@) has a description of the hoops he jumped through to get stereo sound out of his Huawei Matebook X under OpenBSD (something that only worked under Windows with special drivers).

His approach involves logging all PCI device accesses by running Windows in QEMU under Linux with VFIO, parsing that, and making the OpenBSD azalia(4) driver do the same.

Thanks to joshua for the interesting write-up!

Kenneth R. Westerback (krw@) writes to inform us:

Microsoft goes Gold for 2018!

The OpenBSD Foundation is happy to announce that Microsoft has increased its support level from Silver to Gold for 2018.

This is the fourth consecutive year that Microsoft has made a contribution to the OpenBSD Foundation and we are grateful for their continuing support.

Thank you, Ken for sharing the good news about the OpenBSD Foundation with the community.

In this commit, Otto Moerbeek (otto@) moved malloc handling from a softlink in /etc to a sysctl instead.

Gilles Chehade (gilles@) has written an article on recent progress in OpenSMTPD. It begins:

TL;DR:
Filters have been a (the most ?) long awaited feature in OpenSMTPD.
I finally committed most of the filters code to OpenBSD.
There is still a bit of work required but the trickiest parts are done.
This article describes how filters are implemented and what to expect.

Returning readers are likely aware that OpenBSD in its OpenBSD/amd64 and OpenBSD/i386 varieties comes with virtualization built in, brought to you by the vmm(4) subsystem.

Now getting started with OpenBSD virtualization has become even easier: The OpenBSD FAQ has a new Virtualization section, written mainly by Solene Rapenne (solene@) and added to the site in this commit, that offers an introduction to the concepts as well as instructions on how to get started with vmm(4).

That's right: go read the thing, and play with vmm! Thanks, Solene!

Earlier this week the OpenBSD foundation received its first Silver donation from an individual contributor. Thank you John Carmack for the very generous contribution! The support will ensure that many important projects are moving forward and continue making impact.

Ken Westerback (krw@ when wearing his dev hat) wrote in with some great news:

The OpenBSD Foundation is excited to announce that it has received a second 2018 Iridium level (>$100K) donation from Handshake.

The release of OpenBSD 6.4 has been announced:

We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 6.4.
This is our 45th release.  We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more
than twenty years with only two remote holes in the default install.
[…]

Rather than reproducing the full list of new features here, we refer readers to the official OpenBSD 6.4 page.

Selected highlights include:

• Support has been added for qcow2 images and external snapshots in vmm(4)/vmd(8).
• "join" has been added for Wi-Fi networks.
• Security enhancements include unveil(2), MAP_STACK, and RETGUARD. Meltdown/Spectre mitigations have been extended further, and SMT is disabled by default.
• rad(8) has replaced rtadvd(8).
• bgpd(8) has undergone numerous improvements, including the addition of support for BGP Origin Validation (RFC 6811).
• smtpd.conf(5) uses a new, more flexible grammar.
• For the first time, there are more than 10,000 (binary) packages (for amd64 and i386).

Those upgrading from version 6.3 should read the upgrade guide.

Readers are encouraged to show their appreciation in the conventional manner.