OpenBSD 7.8 out now, and you're not seeing double, 9front releases 'Release'

New version includes multithreaded TCP/IP and Raspberry Pi 5 support

The 59th version of the OpenBSD operating system is here, six months after 7.7, with multiple improvements in various areas.

OpenBSD's installer is not for the timid, so we do not recommend dual-booting if you don't have previous experience. That means it's best to dedicate a machine to it while you learn your way around. With version 7.8 there's an new, affordable, and fairly high performance way to do this: it now has official support for the Raspberry Pi 5 (along with multiple other Arm64 platforms.)

This support does come with an important caveat, though:

Added support for Raspberry Pi 5 (with console on serial port).

The emphasis is ours. So, you should be ready to wire up an RS-232 connector to your Pi 5's GPIO connector. There are RS-232 HATs available, and there's a small chance that a USB-to-RS-232 adaptor might work, but we wouldn't rely on it. The code change was committed in September, and mentions other limitations:

Known issues:

• Booting from PCIe storage HATs doesn't work because of missing U-Boot support.

• WiFi on the Raspberry Pi 5 Model B "d0" boards doesn't work.

• The active cooler (fan) doesn't work because of missing pwm/clock drivers (some work is in-progress).

Elsewhere in the Arm world, it also has improved support for Apple Silicon Macs, Snapdragon Elite X laptops, and Arm64 power management.

The other improvement that seemed especially interesting to us was that the OpenBSD TCP/IP stack is now multithreaded. It scales with the number of CPUs in the machine, up to a maximum of eight cores, with one connection handled by one core. This includes some of the more computationally-demanding aspects of IPv6.

There's also built-in support for AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization tech. This includes OpenBSD's built-in VMM/VMD hypervisor, which can now create and managed SEV-encrypted VMs, but it also extends to running OpenBSD in an SEV VM on Linux's KVM.

A few months ago we surveyed tiling terminal multiplexers, and tmux came out looking good. OpenBSD already supported tmux, but 7.8 has enough improvement to merit their own section in the release notes, with 16 new features and bugfixes.

Nothing hugely radical, but all welcome.

Early last year, after installing several previous versions and thus gaining a very little familiarity with the OS, including its extremely terse fdisk command, we installed version 7.5 on the bare metal of an old Thinkpad W500. It's multi-booting alongside Windows XP 64, NetBSD 10, and two Linux distros, so it's a non-trivial setup which took some work to achieve.

OpenBSD in-place upgrades are strictly from one version to the next, and since then, we've upgraded to 7.6 and recently to 7.7. We tried again with this version, and it went very smoothly and took only a few minutes. The recommended procedure is pretty simple and clear. In a root shell, check for any security updates by running syspatch. This only upgrades the base system – the core OS – so then you must upgrade all installed packages by with pkg_add -u. You can also check for any updates to the firmware packages OpenBSD includes with fw_update. The paranoid will probably reboot each time, but we just pressed ahead. As the last step in 7.7, we ran sysupgrade.

As it has previously, it took us by surprise by rebooting the machine unbidden without prompts or warnings, but it did its job, ran through the upgrade phase, rebooted again, and we were in OpenBSD 7.8. It's impressively fast and smooth. We then ran pkg_add -u again in order to update our installed software, which took much longer than pre-upgrade, installing new versions of Firefox, various GNOME-derived themes and libraries (even though the machine doesn't have GNOME installed) and other components. Everything worked without a hitch.

(By way of comparison, we have seen FreeBSD upgrades cause serious problems, and our attempt to do an in-place upgrade of NetBSD 10.0 to 10.1 has completely b0rked the installation.)

We are gradually coming to appreciate OpenBSD's benefits. This version still has absolutely no Bluetooth support, but the Reg FOSS desk strongly dislikes Bluetooth too and we don't miss it. We are not alone in this. Next we have to master the partition tools well enough in order to make enough space to install Xfce – ideally in a multiboot setup. However, its simplicity and cleanliness makes a welcome contrast to the other BSDs, which somehow feel more Baroque or even Rococo. ®

Bootnote

Last time around, we mentioned 9front in the same story, because they were released very close together and both had artwork from the same artist.

This time, 9front got its Release out rather sooner: 11 days sooner, in fact. We capitalize Release because, with the project's typical unhelpfulness whimsical humor, the October 2025 release of 9front is in fact called Release, which allows the project to have a Release release announcement, which says:

9FRONT "RELEASE" RELEASED