OpenBSD 7.6 launches with Milk-V Pioneer support, security fixes, and more
On its way to next year's 30th anniversary, OpenBSD stops for another checkpoint. This time, it's the update labeled 7.6, which succeeds the version that arrived earlier this year, on April 5th. Today also marks the end of support for OpenBSD 7.4, which was released on October 16th, 2023.
According to the official update page,
"With this release all files that existed in the first commit in the OpenBSD source repository have been updated, modified or replaced at some point in time, reaching OpenBSD of Theseus."
The list of changes coming with OpenBSD 7.6 includes the following highlights:
- Support for the Milk-V Pioneer board and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (X1E80100) processor.
- AVX-512 extensions support.
- Multiple kernel improvements, such as S0 sleep states support and a fix for kernel crashes caused by invalid printables in ELF binaries.
- Better exposure of CPU features to virtual machines.
- Multiple driver bugfixes for hardware from various brands, including AMD, Intel, and Rockchip.
- Wireless stack (IEEE 802.11) fixes and tweaks.
- Support for the RISC-V UEFI boot protocol and other installer/upgrade and bootloader improvements.
- Several security improvements, including the -fret-clean option to the compiler, with its default set to off.
OpenBSD 7.6 supports the same architectures as its predecessor, including alpha, amd64, armv7, i386, octeon, and powerpc64. Those who are going to upgrade from 7.5 to 7.6 should check out this page to make sure everything will go smoothly. The full list of changes is available right here.
Those new to OpenBSD and other similar systems, as well as experienced users, might want to check out BSD UNIX Toolbox: 1000+ Commands for FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD, which goes for $16.99 on Amazon (Kindle format). A paperback version is also available, priced at $26.93.
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