OpenBSD 7.7 released with updated hardware support, 9Front ships second update of 2025
- Reference: 1745935271
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/04/29/openbsd_77_is_out/
- Source link:
OpenBSD is about the most minimalist of the modern FOSS Unix-like OSes. [1]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 [2]Omron workstations based on Motorola's 88000 RISC processors. Even so, support for more modern hardware remains current. As [3]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, [4]released last September , and [5]KDE Plasma 6.3.3 from March, based on [6]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.
[7]
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 [8]February FreeBSD news release mentions porting an OpenBSD WiFi driver. This is part of the continuing [9]Laptop Desktop Working Group effort, which we [10]reported on last year .
[11]
[12]
The cover art for this release, entitled [13]Life of a Fish , is by Tomáš Rodr, also known as [14]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 [15]Clause 15 Common Elements of Maus and Star Type . This is credited to [16]prahou , but it's the same artist, as we confirmed from [17]a Fediverse post .
This marks the second 9Front release of the year – the previous, [18]This Time Definitely , came out in January, as we [19]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.
[20]Version 7.6 – the 'OpenBSD of Theseus' – released
[21]OpenBSD enthusiast cooks up guide for the technically timid
[22]GNOME 47 brings back some customization options, but let's not go crazy
[23]OpenBSD 7.5 locks down with improved disk encryption support and syscall limitations
The headline feature is timed snapshots for its new filesystem, which is called [24]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 [25]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.
We have [26]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 [27]OpenBSD homepage proudly proclaims:
Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!
The [28]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. ®
Get our [29]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.openbsd.org/77.html
[2] https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html
[3] https://www.osnews.com/story/142229/openbsd-7-7-released/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/30/gnome_47/
[5] https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.3.3/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/19/kde_plasma_63/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aBFL7AsD13qlhmT_Qvk0mQAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[8] https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/laptop-support-and-usability-project-update-first-monthly-report-community-initiatives/
[9] https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/blob/main/monthly-updates/2024-12.md
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/01/freebsd_and_samba_funding/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aBFL7AsD13qlhmT_Qvk0mQAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aBFL7AsD13qlhmT_Qvk0mQAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://www.openbsd.org/images/LifeOfAFish.png
[14] https://analognowhere.com/
[15] https://9front.org/releases/2025/04/26/0/
[16] https://merveilles.town/@prahou/
[17] https://snac.9front.club/thedaemon/p/1745805697.150178
[18] https://9front.org/releases/2025/01/19/0/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/06/14_years_of_systemd/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/version_76_openbsd_of_theseus/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/25/openbsd_for_the_people/
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/30/gnome_47/
[23] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/12/openbsd_75_disk_encryption/
[24] https://orib.dev/gefs.html
[25] https://lobste.rs/s/gydqtq/gefs_good_enough_file_system_for_plan_9
[26] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/12/openbsd_75_disk_encryption/
[27] https://www.openbsd.org/
[28] https://9front.org/
[29] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Upgrades are always welcome
So easy to apply with sysupgrade too - type command, make cup of tea, done!
I might have to revisit the wireless capability, as last time I checked (a few years now) it was rather spotty. I had issues running OpenBSD as an access point, and eventually gave up and bought a dedicated AP (which mostly worked much better, but not entirely, because one particular mobile has abysmal wireless capability and was actually more stable under the older OpenBSD chipset I was using. Every thing else was far faster on the new AP.)
It'd be nice to have a more modern file system in OpenBSD, but as I generally use it on firewalls it hasn't been much of an issue. One grubby little secret of FreeBSD is that ZFS isn't actually completely resilient - mirrored swap in particular can fail under low memory conditions. The workarounds are either don't mirror your swap (stupid), or use gmirror to mirror it. However gmirror needs to be set up from the command line - particularly on a modern UEFI system. You should also allocate an EFI partition considerably in excess of 1M (suggested by one guide online), I just selected 1G to be sure. Mirror the EFI partition or don't stick it in fstab, otherwise your install won't actually be resilient on reboot!
I've also had a crash in FreeBSD's disk driver take out my ZFS on root mirror, requiring recovery from install media. Not difficult to do, and it only happened once, but it's still a little concerning.
Re. OpenBSD's partitioning scheme
OpenBSD was the second OS I tried afted I'd decided to leave Windows behind, way back in 2004 (the first was RedHat, which was, and remains, unsavoury).
Getting used to BSD labels ('slices' in FreeBSD parlance) did take a bit of effort, IIRC, but, really, it's not that complicated. On x86 it's actually quite convenient if you're dual-booting from the same disk, since everything is contained in a single primary partition.
Re: Re. OpenBSD's partitioning scheme
> Getting used to BSD labels ('slices' in FreeBSD parlance) did take a bit of effort, IIRC, but, really, it's not that complicated.
I will take your word for it, but still, this is sort of missing the main point here.
Last time around, I enumerated them. There were 9 volumes in the default install:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/version_76_openbsd_of_theseus/
And as I mentioned 3 years ago:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/openbsd_71_released_including_apple/
... that means that given a 16GB virtual drive, just installing the relatively small Xfce desktop left insufficient room to install Firefox.
_That_ is the problem here. I need to foresee the future, correctly predict what I will install someday and how much space it will take where.
I lack the gift of precise precognition so I can't. Result: problem. You can't reassign this stuff by dragging a slider in Gparted as if it were Linux.
25+ years ago, the proprietary Unixes were getting LVM, where you can resize volumes on the fly and the OS reallocates the underlying disk blocks for you. Today, in Linux, LVM is needlessly overcomplicated, overlaps significantly with the functionality of tools such as Btrfs, OpenZFS, bcachefs etc., and to an approximation the only people using it are those who want full-disk encryption via LUKS, poor schmucks.
But on OpenBSD the core LVM functionality would be a big win. Here's a dollop of disk space, divide it into a dozen subvolumes if you want, some executable, some writable, some modifiable, some SUID-able, whatever -- but adjust usage as you need, on the fly, as I install stuff, so that nothing ever goes over 75% used.
As it is today, you can't. You just need knowledge, judgement, and the patience to reinstall your OS repeatedly until you know what you will need.
Re: Re. OpenBSD's partitioning scheme
I get the impression that most OpenBSD users are using it as an appliance-like server. They set it up to do one thing and it just does that one thing. They interact with it on occasion via SSH. In a minimal install It doesn't seem to get a lot of updates, so it's fairly painless from a maintenance perspective. As a result of this, there probably isn't a lot of pressure to change the file system compared to other things that may be on the "to do" list.
Re: Re. OpenBSD's partitioning scheme
Pretty much. I love OpenBSD but it's not a great desktop, and the OpenBSD team have, and will continue to, put security before everything else. That's moderately fine in an appliance, less so for a desktop.
If you stick to the functionality purely in base and don't use anything really obscure you're unlikely to run into many issues.
OpenBSD is a lot better as a desktop than it used to be - you've got the usual browser, Libreoffice, and moderately decent graphics chipset support. vmm allows for other OS to be virtualised - but with no graphics, so that's a tad limiting. WINE is a complete non starter (it's also not great under FreeBSD - Linux's API coverage is an order of magnitude better).
There's been a lot of ongoing grumbling about the file system, but OpenBSD are very strict about licensing (which is why ZFS isn't on there), and are also generally pretty conservative. It's the only BSD where I would be happy to run -current.
Re: Re. OpenBSD's partitioning scheme
@Liam,
May I respectfully ask you why people wanting full-disk encryption via LUKS are fully entitled to be called 'poor schmucks'?
Re: Re. OpenBSD's partitioning scheme
I've used LUKS for many years, on my /home partition, and never had an issue. It's generally setup post-install, certainly on Ubuntu, but I use a 'stub' /home in the root partition to do the OS installation, then map in the encrypted home partition later on. This means if you ever lose/break the encrypted /home, you can at least still boot and login to the machine without it complaining about a missing /home dir.
No problems so far
I installed OpenBSD 7.7 in a KVM VM on Sunday evening when it came out. I use it in a testing environment, running a series of automated tests alongside a dozen other targets. I have had no problems with it so far, it worked just like 7.6 except for updated packages.