OpenBSD 7.7 released with updated hardware support, 9Front ships second update of 2025

The OS refresh brings Ryzen AI and Arrow Lake compatibility

Fresh from their respective bunkers, OpenBSD 7.7 and a new version of Plan 9 fork 9Front have dropped, bringing hardened security, obscure charm, and, oddly enough, artwork from the same designer.

OpenBSD 7.7's striking cover art, copyright Tomáš Rodr - click to enlarge

OpenBSD is about the most minimalist of the modern FOSS Unix-like OSes. Version 7.7 has just come out, and as usual, the release notes are comprehensive, with an extensive list of updates.

The project still caters to a surprisingly wide array of aging and obscure hardware, with fresh tweaks in 7.7 for HP's PA-RISC boxes and the Omron workstations based on Motorola's 88000 RISC processors. Even so, support for more modern hardware remains current. As OSnews notes:

OpenBSD 7.7 adds support for Ryzen AI 300 (Strix Point, Strix Halo, Krackan Point), Radeon RX 9070 (Navi 48), and Intel's Arrow Lake.

It also includes GNOME 47, released last September, and KDE Plasma 6.3.3 from March, based on February's KDE Plasma 6.3. Not absolutely cutting-edge, but very recent releases.

In addition, it's notable that alongside very recent desktop environments and support for current-model CPUs, there are many changes relating to power management. OpenBSD can be an extremely lightweight OS – it supports operating in just 32MB of memory, although not if you're using GNOME or KDE Plasma – and it's a good fit for laptops.

As an example, its WiFi subsystem supports more recent chipsets and network standards than those in the larger and better-funded FreeBSD project. For instance, a February FreeBSD news release mentions porting an OpenBSD WiFi driver. This is part of the continuing Laptop Desktop Working Group effort, which we reported on last year.

The cover art for this release, entitled Life of a Fish, is by Tomáš Rodr, also known as analouguenowhere. The style struck us as markedly similar to the release artwork for the new version of Plan 9 from Bell Labs fork 9Front, inscrutably dubbed Clause 15 Common Elements of Maus and Star Type. This is credited to prahou, but it's the same artist, as we confirmed from a Fediverse post.

This marks the second 9Front release of the year – the previous, This Time Definitely, came out in January, as we noted from FOSDEM. The newest 9Front has some refreshed support for pretty modern hardware too, including a driver for Intel's i225 2.5Gb Ethernet hardware, SIMD support, and AMD Ryzen temperature sensors.

The headline feature is timed snapshots for its new filesystem, which is called Gefs. Gefs is intended to be a modern, crash-safe filesystem that can detect and handle corruption without a slow fsck process, and has copy-on-write snapshot support, such as found in more notorious infamous celebrated filesystems such as ZFS and bcachefs.

Its author Ori Bernstein talked about the new filesystem on Lobsters a couple of years ago, including an unexpected ambition:

once I have it stable and trustworthy on 9front, I'd like to port it to OpenBSD as well.

Always political, the image for 9Front "Clause 15" combines bunnies and detention camps - click to enlarge

We have noted before that OpenBSD's disk partitioning is extremely complicated, and it would really benefit from some sort of logical volume management style tool as found in many enterprise Unix and Linux OSes these days. It would be a very unexpected step if it received such a thing via 9Front.

Bootnote

The OpenBSD homepage proudly proclaims:

Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!

The 9Front one is not so much more modest as slightly taking the Mickey, when it says in bold red text:

Only $NUMBER remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!

The gag here is that the number of remote holes changes every time that you load the page. ®