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.

Ingo Schwarze (schwarze@) writes in about fresh developments in mandoc(1):

During EuroBSDCon 2018 in Bucuresti, Adam Kalisz suggested to add a table of contents near the top of the HTML output of mandoc, and i just implemented and committed that.

EuroBSDcon 2018 is now over, and slides for OpenBSD-related presentations are now available from the usual place. As always, there's some great reading there (especially for those of us who were unable to attend the conference).

Unfortunately, there will not be any video this year.

Fresh from the just concluded n2k18 hackathon comes this report from Ken Westerback (krw@), who writes:

How to travel from Dresden to Usti nad Labem for free!

No drama flying to Dresden, from which a train would take me to n2k18's home in Usti nad Labem. Other than being puzzled that it costs less to fly YYZ -> FRA -> DRS than it costs to fly YYZ -> FRA.

In a short series of commits, Carlos Cardenas (ccardenas@) added support for qcow2 image support to vmd(8). [This builds on an earlier commit adding support for pluggable disk backends.] The code was written by Ori Bernstein, who posted his diffs (thread 1, thread 2) to the tech@openbsd.org mailing list in August.

Anton Lindqvist (anton@) gave a talk at BSD Users Stockholm Meetup #3 on the kernel coverage tracing kit he committed recently. Slides are now available via the OpenBSD Events and Papers page.

The slides contain a list of bugs found and fixed as a result of this work.

See also: kcov(4)

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 the first 2018 Iridium level donation. This year the first $100K+ donation came from Handshake (https://www.handshake.org).

We thank Handshake for its very generous support! This donation will no doubt fund many exciting projects in the coming years.

Congratulations to all concerned.

Of course, this donation does not preclude others from contributing ;-)