OpenBSD 8.0 Released

The OpenBSD project has announced OpenBSD 8.0, its 61^st release.

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

• OpenBSD/amd64 kernel virtual address space is now 512GB [See earlier report]
• Mitigation for AMD Zen-2 operation cache corruption added [See commit]
• OpenBSD now uses AES instructions (on amd64 and arm64 when available) to increase speed of swap encryption/decryption [See commit]
• The OpenBSD/loongson hardware platform has been retired [See earlier report]
• getexecpath(3) added [See commit]
• drm(4) has been updated to Linux 6.18.53
• vmm(4)/vmd(8) improvements:
  • files are now used to manage VM ownership [See earlier report]
  • multi-processor VMs are now supported [See earlier report]
• WPA3 support introduced [See earlier report]
• syslogd(8) privileged and non-privileged parts now separate binaries [See earlier report]
• qwz(4) driver for Qualcomm Technologies WCN7850 wireless network devices added [See commit]
• PF queues break the 4 Gbps barrier [See earlier report]
• httpd(8) and smtpd(8) are now randomly relinked at boot [See earlier report]
• httpd(8) has seen many improvements:
  • support for custom HTTP headers [See earlier reports]
  • header block/drop rules for request filtering [See earlier report]
  • improved default crypto methods for HTTPS [See earlier report]
  • cache control for static files [See commit]
• relayd(8) has received several improvements:
  • improved default crypto methods for HTTPS [See earlier report]
  • support for ECDSA keys and certificates was added [See earlier report]
  • filter rules gained support for Lua patterns(7) [See earlier report]
  • support for multiple resolvable addresses [See commit]
• rtrd(8), a RTR-To-Router protocol daemon, and its control program, rtrctl(8), were imported [See earlier report]
• acme-client(1) gained support for external account binding [See commit]
• Several improvements in OpenBGPD [See earlier reports]
• A number of incremental improvements in rpki-client(8) [See earlier reports]
• tmux(1) gained support for floating panes [See commit]
• LibreSSL 4.4.0 [See earlier reports]
• OpenSSH 10.6 [See earlier reports]
• llvm/clang(1)/lld(1) updated to version 22.1.6 [See earlier report]
• LLVM toolchain added to OpenBSD/sparc64 [See earlier report]
• compiler-rt, libunwind, libcxxabi, libcxx updated to version 22.1.8

In addition, this release offers a number of bug fixes and as well as numerous improvements in hardware support.

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!