OpenBSD 7.4 Released

Long-time Slashdot reader Noryungi writes: OpenBSD 7.4 has been officially released. The 55th release of this BSD operating system, known for being security oriented, brings a lot of new things, including dynamic tracer, pfsync improvements, loads of security goodies and virtualization improvements. Grab your copy today! As mentioned by Phoronix's Michael Larabel, some of the key highlights include:

- Dynamic Tracer (DT) and Utrace support on AMD64 and i386 OpenBSD
- Power savings for those running OpenBSD 7.4 on Apple Silicon M1/M2 CPUs by allowing deep idle states when available for the idle loop and suspend
- Support for the PCIe controller found on Apple M2 Pro/Max SoCs
- Allow updating AMD CPU Microcode updating when a newer patch is available
- A workaround for the AMD Zenbleed CPU bug
- Various SMP improvements
- Updating the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver support against the upstream Linux 6.1.55 state
- New drivers for supporting various Qualcomm SoC features
- Support for soft RAID disks was improved for the OpenBSD installer
- Enabling of Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) on x86_64 and Branch Target Identifier (BTI) on ARM64 for capable processors

You can download and view all the new changes via OpenBSD.org.

I'm beginning to think

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Netcraft has been lying [uncyc.org] this whole time.

Easiest

[jmccue]

Of all Operating Systems I have upgraded, by far OpenBSD upgrade is the easiest.

One great addition was the addition of memory leak detection using ktrace(1). I played with it and to me it is much easier then using valgrind. Granted valgrind has to jump through hoops due to how Linux is developed, so valgrind does amazing work with what they have to work with :)

Re:Easiest

[Mononymous]

I upgraded to 7.4 earlier today. It sure seemed easy at the time.
But I multi-boot FreeBSD, Manjaro Linux, and OpenBSD on my laptop.
OpenBSD acts like it's the only OS on your system, even in this day of GPT and EFI when you can potentially have more than 100.
sysupgrade assumed the OpenBSD bootloader was the default in my ESP, so clobbered it.
I had to run manjaro-chroot and re-install grub, before I could boot into Manjaro again.
OpenBSD doesn't focus on features, or convenience--though it often is quite easy to use.
I don't see them doing anything to make things easier for multi-boot anytime soon.
Still, that behavior is reminiscent of Windows.

Re:

[Mononymous]

Silly question: but why should OpenBSD cater for a scenario that hasn't been relevant

OpenBSD's focus is correctness. Assuming the default, as opposed to checking which EFI entry you booted from, is incorrect behavior.

What scenarios are you running that you need to run on bare metal?

Clearly this isn't a question of need. I do this because I enjoy it.

Virtualization's interesting, and no doubt useful in a server environment. But I have no desire to run my desktop apps with several cores and gigabytes missing.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Debian has done something similar to me twice now. Some update disables the os-prober option in grub which removes the option to boot windows. Thanks Debian, any more of my config files you would like to overwrite?

Theo de Raadt: I am the founder of OpenBSD

[Mirnotoriety]

Theo de Raadt: I am the founder of OpenBSD [theos.com]

Nice

[ArchieBunker]

Think I will upgrade my firewall/router box this weekend.