TL;DR

• OpenBSD 7.6 released! (Announcement).
• No more packages updates for 7.5, syspatch will still be published.
• No more syspatches for 7.4, it is now end of life and shouldn't be used any longer.
• The OpenBSD store has 7.6 goodies available.
• A new version of sysupgrade (not in 7.6) allows upgrading from old OpenBSD versions to the latest available. See the tips section below for more information.
• The webzine is 3 years old!

New 7.6 release highlights

• Modern desktops are available: GNOME 46, Plasma 6.1.4
• Support for AVX-512 instructions.
• Ensure that the deepest possible C-state is selected during suspend-to-idle on amd64 and i386.
• Faster hibernation (when hibernating and booting).
• S0ix suspend support, use sysctl machdep.lidaction=-1 to tell the kernel to use S0 instead of S3. Next release 7.7 will decide itself if it should switch to S0ix or S3 but it was not ready in time.
• Less crash with fuse filesystems.
• Buffer size for unix sockets increased from 8192 to 32768.
• Allowed running UDP input on multiple CPU in parallel.
• Updated graphical drivers to Linux 6.6.52. (includes support for Meteor Lake in inteldrm driver).
• Added vmctl "status -r" to limit the output of "vmctl status" to only running VMs.
• Enabled AMD SEV support in vmm and vmd.
• Imported libva 2.22.0, an implementation for VA-API (video acceleration API). VA-API provides access to graphics hardware acceleration capabilities for video processing. You will need the package intel-media-driver for intel 5xxx and newer, and intel-vaapi-driver for older CPUs.
• Made sndiod discover new devices on SIGHUP and switch if a new device is higher priority.
• Added boot.conf option "machine idle [secs]" to halt at idle passphrase prompts for efi systems.
• In PF, allow users to define tables inside an anchor in the same way they can define global tables in pf.conf.
• Reduced tmux escape-time default to 10 milliseconds (from 500). (no more issues with vi-like editors!).
• OpenSSH now supports a new hybrid post-Quantum key exchange algorithm "mlkem768x25519-sha256".
• Support for DSA keys is now disabled at compile time in all OpenSSH tools.
• Split sshd into two separate processes: a listener binary and a new sshd-session binary that handles each connection.
• sshd will now penalise clients that connect without completing authentication, crash the server or perform other unwelcome activities. This behaviour is controlled via the PerSourcePenalties and PerSourcePenaltyExemptList sshd_config options.
• Many other changes!

Shell tips

Theo De Raadt committed a new version of sysupgrade, adding the ability to jump from an old OpenBSD version (down to 5.5 I think) to the latest release available. While this upgrade path is not really supported, it is now possible. The script will download signify keys of the new release, signed by the keys of your current release, this assures a continuity in the chain of trust

You can download the new version from cvsweb and save it locally. Just make it executable and you can run it to jump to a latest release.

Be careful, there is no guarantee the upgrade path will work 100%, although it should work most of the time :)

Artwork of the moment

Artwork by Prahou.

Authors

Solène Rapenne and the people involved in the translations. Many thanks to everyone supportive of the idea!