The OpenBSD project has announced the release of OpenBSD 7.8, a free UNIX-like operating system. The project, founded by Theo de Raadt in 1995, was born out of conflict with NetBSD developers that led to Theo being denied access to the NetBSD CVS repository. Theo and a group of like-minded individuals created a new open operating system based on the NetBSD source tree, with main goals of portability (supporting 13 hardware platforms), standardization, correct performance, proactive security, and integrated cryptography. The full installation ISO image of the OpenBSD 7.8 base system is 597 MB.
In addition to the operating system, the OpenBSD project is known for its components that have been widely adopted by other systems for their safety and quality. These components include LibreSSL (an OpenSSL fork), OpenSSH, packet filter PF, routing daemons OpenBGPD and OpenOSPFD, NTP server OpenNTPD, mail server OpenSMTPD, tmux (a text terminal multiplexer), identd daemon with IDENT protocol implementation, mandoc (a BSDL alternative to GNU groff), CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) for fault-tolerant systems, a lightweight http server, and file synchronization utility OpenRSYNC.
Some main changes in OpenBSD 7.8 include:
- Support for Raspberry Pi 5 boards added to the ARM64 architecture port, implementation of the acpicpu driver, and support for apm (Advanced Power Management) and sysctl hw.cpuspeed on devices with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips.
- Implementation of support for the FD_CLOFORK (close-on-fork) flag, allowing file descriptors to be closed for child processes after fork() calls and cleared after exec() calls for security reasons.
- Addition of a subsystem for high-level operations related to soft interrupt dispatchers’ allocation, scheduling, and dispatching.
- Transition of the kernel to using nanoseconds instead of timer ticks for the sleep function execution, to prevent loss of precision during conversions between nanoseconds and ticks when initiating operations from user space library functions.
- Enhanced compatibility with file systems based on FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) mechanism, using the libfuse library implementation.