OpenBSD 7.8 Released

The OpenBSD project has announced OpenBSD 7.8, its 59^th release.

The new release contains a number of significant improvements, including but certainly not limited to:

• Preliminary support for Raspberry Pi 5 added [See earlier report]
• New profiling subsystem [See earlier report]
• TCP input now runs in parallel [See earlier report]
• Parallel TCP input has been optimised [See earlier report]
• vmm(4)/vmd(8) now support SEV-ES on AMD processors
• vmd(8) send/receive functionality was removed [See commit]
• watch(1) utility added [See earlier report]
• New acpiwmi(4) driver for ACPI Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) [See earlier report]
• New EFI boot(8) "machine fwsetup" command for rebooting into the firmware user interface
• The installer now prefers disks over 1GB [See earlier report]
• rc.d(8) and rcctl(8) gained "-q" options [See commits]
• Font caching no longer runs as root [See earlier report]
• New erspan(4) driver for ERSPAN Type II collection [See earlier report]
• LLDP daemon and tool have been added [See earlier report]
• bpflogd(8) has been added [See earlier report]
• pkg_add -u no longer advises file removal [See earlier report]
• Yubikey OTP support disabled [See earlier report]
• acme-client(1) now supports draft-ietf-acme-profiles-00 specifications for certificate profiles, such as those offered by Let's Encrypt - see acme-client.conf(5) "profile" keyword
• TearFree option backported to modesetting(4) driver [See earlier report]
• libpng has been bundled into libfreetype for improved font rendering [See commits]
• stdio(3)'s FILE is now opaque [See earlier report]
• clang(1)/llvm/lld(1) updated to version 19 [See earlier report]
• C++ library updated [See earlier report]
• OpenSMTPD 7.7.0p0 [See earlier report]
• LibreSSL 4.2.0[See earlier report]
• OpenSSH 10.2 [See earlier reports on releases of versions 10.2 & 10.1]:
  • ssh-agent(1) and sshd(8) listener sockets moved from /tmp to under ~/.ssh/agent [See earlier report]
  • DSA signature support removed [See earlier report]
  • New ssh(1) configuration directive, RefuseConnection [See earlier report]
  • It is now possible to use Ed25519 keys hosted on PKCS#11 tokens [See earlier report]
  • ssh(1) now issues a warning when the connection negotiates a non-post-quantum key agreement algorithm
  • OpenSSH will now adapt IP QoS to actual sessions and traffic [See earlier report]

See the full changelog for more details of the changes made over this latest six month development cycle.

The Installation Guide details how to get the system up and running with a fresh install, while those who already run earlier releases should follow the Upgrade Guide, in most cases using sysupgrade(8).

Readers are encouraged to celebrate the new release by donating to the project to support further development of our favourite OS!