Lean, correct code and therefore maximum security are principles that the developers of the BSD operating system (Berkeley Software Distribution) OpenBSD have adhered to since 25 years. Yesterday, Sunday, OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt published the 49. Version of the free Unix derivative with freely accessible source code.

OpenBSD 6.8 runs on POWER9 Among many large and small innovations, the support for Power-ISA v3.0 (“POWER9”) from the OpenPOWER Foundation under the leadership of IBM stands out. The porting to the modern architecture started with OpenBSD 6.7 in May of this year. OpenBSD 6.8 / powerpc 49 runs on machines from “Raptor Engineering” in the form of the Raptor Talos II (workstation with two 4/8 / 18 / 22 – Core POWER9 CPUs, PCI Express 4.0, auditable OpenBMC firmware) and the Micro-ATX mainboard Raptor Blackbird (single socket Micro-ATX, up to 18 cores, maximum 256 GByte RAM).

OpenBSD 6.8 can also be started on IBM PowerNV systems (non-virtualized), but unfortunately not (yet) under a hypervisor like PowerVM or PowerKVM. The POWER9 developments from Rackspace and Google should be exciting in the future: Barreleye G2 at Rackspace and Zaius at Google are to be rolled out in their gigantic data centers. The high CPU performance per watt and security functions such as the Harvard architecture for the caches (separate data and instruction cache) could be reasons for looking for an alternative to AMD, Intel and ARM.

Scant information about installing deliver the platform documentation for OpenBSD 6.8 / powerpc 64 and the still very clear openbsd -ppc mailing list. According to the developers, OpenBSD 6.8 has not yet been tested on POWER8 systems. OpenBSD 6.8 is still available for older PowerPC platforms (Apple Macintosh G4 / G5, PPC-iMac and Mac mini).

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Faster time measurement Software such as web browsers and Office programs ran under OpenBSD with the “handbrake on” until now. One of the reasons was the frequent queries of the system time by these programs. Many of these gettimeofday (2) system calls have been optimized by the OpenBSD developers so that important desktop software in the new version can be used on the amd 49, arm 64 and sparc 64 runs noticeably smoother.

For the popular architectures amd 64 and arm 64 got OpenBSD 6.8 many Improvements, new features and more drivers. For example, the Pinebook Pro, which is apparently popular with OpenBSD developers, now runs with a dimmable display, a functioning battery indicator and ES 8316 sound . IoT developers can look forward to the arm 49 disassembler, ported by NetBSD, which works with the kernel debugger ddb (4) cooperates. Older platforms are also maintained at OpenBSD, so i 256 received an NVMe driver.

Also at the IEEE 802. 11 – Wireless stack eliminated some problems, so that, for example, the Raspberry Pi 3 (exactly this one!) With a WLAN chip set in HostAP mode, a minimal DHCP server and a few lines in the configuration file pf.conf / 5) of the pf packet filter into a WLAN access point.

With a few modifications and a minimal DHCP server, a Raspberry Pi 3 becomes an access point within a very short time.

(Image: screenshot)

Terminal multiplexer tmux With the terminal multiplexer tmux used in OpenBSD, the Data transmission significantly optimized. Some changes in the front end make working with tmux easier – for example with a new command line completion that shows possible completions as a menu. The search process in tmux has been further adapted to the behavior of emacs – friends of vi will grind their teeth.

The modern and native OpenBSD hypervisor VMM / VMD is now pleasantly stable and has received little news , with LDOM / SPARC 49, however, the VM start process has been improved in many places.

Compared to ZFS (FreeBSD), HAMMER2 (Dragonfly BSD) or Btrfs (GNU / Linux), the FFS2 file system looks much outdated; In view of the primary areas of application of OpenBSD as a secure appliance or developer notebook, the developers see little need for action here. Nevertheless, FFS2 received extensions, can now handle significantly larger file systems and performs faster file system checks.

Security and Networks OpenBSD 6.8 is now supported with LLVM / Clang 10, GCC is included in the heavily patched versions 4.2.1 and 3.3.6 for compatibility reasons – newer versions are not acceptable because of their license for OpenBSD. LibreSSL, the slim and secure alternative to OpenSSL, is available in version 3.2.2, OpenSSH as 8.4 and the OpenSMTPD, which was developed from scratch some time ago, as version 6.8.

As usual, there are countless small ones Innovations and fixes in the areas of security and network have been incorporated. In addition, a lot of old and unsafe code was disposed of: The number of available