OpenBSD 7.1 Released with Support for Apple M1, Improvements for ARM64 and RISC-V (openbsd.org) 26
"Everyone's favorite security focused operating system, OpenBSD 7.1 has been released for a number of architectures," writes long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker, "including Apple M1 chips."
Phoronix calls it "the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system." With OpenBSD 7.1, the Apple Silicon support is now considered "ready for general use" with keypad/touchpad support for M1 laptops, a power management controller driver added, I2C and SPI controller drivers, and a variety of other driver additions for supporting the Apple Silicon hardware.
OpenBSD 7.1 also has a number of other improvements benefiting the 64-bit ARM (ARM64) and RISC-V architectures. OpenBSD 7.1 also brings SMP kernel improvements, support for futexes with shared anonymous memory, and more. On the graphics front there is updating the Linux DRM code against the state found in Linux 5.15.26 as well as now enabling Intel Elkhart Lake / Jasper Lake / Rocket Lake support.
The Register notes OpenBSD now "supports a surprisingly wide range of hardware: x86-32, x86-64, ARM7, Arm64, DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, Hitachi SH4, Motorola 88000, MIPS64, SPARC64, RISC-V 64, and both Apple PowerPC and IBM POWER." The Register's FOSS desk ran up a copy in VirtualBox, and we were honestly surprised how quick and easy it was. By saying "yes" to everything, it automatically partitioned the VM's disk into a rather complex array of nine slices, installed the OS, a boot loader, an X server and display manager, plus the FVWM window manager. After a reboot, we got a graphical login screen and then a rather late-1980s Motif-style desktop with an xterm.
It was easy to install XFCE, which let us set the screen resolution and other modern niceties, and there are also KDE, GNOME, and other pretty front-ends, plus plenty of familiar tools such as Mozilla apps, LibreOffice and so on....
We were expecting to have to do a lot more work. Yes, OpenBSD is a niche OS, but the project gave the world OpenSSH, LibreSSL, the PF firewall as used in macOS, much of Android's Bionic C library, and more besides.... In a world of multi-gigabyte OSes, it's quite refreshing. It felt like stepping back into the early 1990s, the era of Real Unix, when you had to put in some real effort and learn stuff in order to bend the OS to your will — but in return, you got something relatively bulletproof.
Phoronix calls it "the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system." With OpenBSD 7.1, the Apple Silicon support is now considered "ready for general use" with keypad/touchpad support for M1 laptops, a power management controller driver added, I2C and SPI controller drivers, and a variety of other driver additions for supporting the Apple Silicon hardware.
OpenBSD 7.1 also has a number of other improvements benefiting the 64-bit ARM (ARM64) and RISC-V architectures. OpenBSD 7.1 also brings SMP kernel improvements, support for futexes with shared anonymous memory, and more. On the graphics front there is updating the Linux DRM code against the state found in Linux 5.15.26 as well as now enabling Intel Elkhart Lake / Jasper Lake / Rocket Lake support.
The Register notes OpenBSD now "supports a surprisingly wide range of hardware: x86-32, x86-64, ARM7, Arm64, DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, Hitachi SH4, Motorola 88000, MIPS64, SPARC64, RISC-V 64, and both Apple PowerPC and IBM POWER." The Register's FOSS desk ran up a copy in VirtualBox, and we were honestly surprised how quick and easy it was. By saying "yes" to everything, it automatically partitioned the VM's disk into a rather complex array of nine slices, installed the OS, a boot loader, an X server and display manager, plus the FVWM window manager. After a reboot, we got a graphical login screen and then a rather late-1980s Motif-style desktop with an xterm.
It was easy to install XFCE, which let us set the screen resolution and other modern niceties, and there are also KDE, GNOME, and other pretty front-ends, plus plenty of familiar tools such as Mozilla apps, LibreOffice and so on....
We were expecting to have to do a lot more work. Yes, OpenBSD is a niche OS, but the project gave the world OpenSSH, LibreSSL, the PF firewall as used in macOS, much of Android's Bionic C library, and more besides.... In a world of multi-gigabyte OSes, it's quite refreshing. It felt like stepping back into the early 1990s, the era of Real Unix, when you had to put in some real effort and learn stuff in order to bend the OS to your will — but in return, you got something relatively bulletproof.
netcraft confirms it (Score:5, Informative)
openbsd rules.
to make something approaching real content here though, I gave openbsd 7.0 a spin recently for something and the upgrade to 7.1 was incredibly polished compared to the last time I used openbsd (circa 3.0), on par with something like an Ubuntu dist-upgrade, and package management vastly improved. big thumbs up to the team for the usability work that went in on those areas!
Re: netcraft confirms it (Score:2)
I've used OpenBSD on small routers a bunch of times over the years. It works great and it's so much more consistent than any given Linux distro.
Last time I tried the disk IO was many times slower than Linux. Network performance was amazing though.
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You aren't kidding about disk IO. With 10gb ethernet and a sata SSD I'm approaching 1gb speeds.
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So I was sitting rhere right now wondering if it is viable to increase the security of my servers by running OpenBSD. Thanks for the heads-up.
OpenBSD firewall is much much easier to handle than Linux iptables, that is for sure. I also ran openBSD on routers
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sysupgrade, followed by a pkg_add -Uu, brought the software stack to a reasonable place. Incredibly simple.
Any performance problems come from the fact that it's almost a 20 year old machine at this point. The backlight will die in the LCD panel before I have to worry about the install corrupting.
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You get modded troll for running OpenBSD on a 20 year old Laptop ??? Very odd.
I have a R51e that I will upgrade soon. I already upgraded my main Thinkpad. But yes, OpenBSD works great on old hardware, giving new life to them. The R51e is very useful for everything but Firefox.
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Let's hope so.
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Oh yeah, I’ll put those on my playlist right away.
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Oh yeah, I’ll put those on my playlist right away.
you mean they aren't already?
I like OBSD but (Score:1)
it's just so slow...
Re: I like OBSD but (Score:2)
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Is there then a trick to get the disk I/O to be on Open BSD fast?
It seems painfully slow compared to Linux on all the places where I have tried it.
As example we run quite many small industrial PCs with m.2 sata SSDs both as routers with Open BSD and and as Controllers/factory workstations with Linux and there is a huge difference in the disk speed where Linux is much faster by a big margin.
Re: I like OBSD but (Score:5, Interesting)
Literally no other operating system that you can download for free can rival Linux's performance. The closest thing ever was BeOS. If Haiku had anything like Linux's manpower then it might pull it off.
It makes sense to run OpenBSD on a firewall, or a desktop if you're security-paranoid, but the only other place that really makes sense is classic servers. It's worth a performance penalty to gain more security. And there is merit to not having the same kernel (and network stack) on your border device as on your workstations. But it's always going to be behind in performance because they don't have the same development resources.
Once you are up to M.2 (I presume NVMe) then I have a hard time imagining why storage performance would be a critical issue on industrial control PCs. Isn't most data being read from and/or written to the network?
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It makes sense to run OpenBSD on a firewall, or a desktop if you're security-paranoid
And it is good for a workstation, many times with software I wrote for work, I would test it on Linux and OpenBSD. Linux (and AIX) it would run fine, but some objects would core dump on OpenBSD. After a short debug session on OpenBSD, it crashed due to memory leaks, which I quickly fixed..
So at the very least, you should have a OpenBSD system available for a test system. But it does make a great workstation and as for speed, I rarely notice any difference between it a Linux.
BTW the upgrade from 7.0 to 7.
Debian supports it? (Score:2)
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A little over a week ago I decided to try OpenBSD on my laptop. I'm dual-booting with Kubuntu. This comment is being written on OpenBSD.
Unfortunately, KDE Plasma is not available, so I'm using XFCE.
It turns out OpenBSD is really good for a laptop, apparently because the developers use it on their own laptops.
It was a lot easier than when I got FreeBSD working on another laptop in 2019. I do love the readable, comprehensive documentation.
My wifi works great. Wake from suspend, media keys, even my backlit key
Re: Debian supports it? (Score:2)
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BSD distros are not usable in desktops yet: nrither video drivers, for current video cards, works well...
FWIW. One of my ancient hardware (a circa 2004 Intel 32 bit laptop with 2 GB RAM) refuses to run anything but OpenBSD, which it runs flawlessly even now. Guess what, even Chromium runs on that hardware :-)
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Strange, very strange (I never saw something like it - and with hardware so new, from less than two decades old: you must be doing something wrong...).
* I've installed linux several times in hardwares from late 90's without any issues several times (hardwares that can't even run a modern browser without much user patience: 2GB of RAM wasn't eve supported that time...)
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Ah, it can accept a GNU/Linux install. It came with Windows 2000. There is something funky with the cooling. The 32-bit x86 hardware gets overheated and shuts down. OpenBSD has been rock steady on this.
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Thank you, will check the suggestions. The x86 hardware finds very little support in the mainstream GNU/Linux distros now a days. Everything has gone AMD64 only now.
After trying OpenBSD with CWM, I find it suits my workflow perfectly. Have setup a set of keyboard shortcuts, which eliminates much of the fiddly hunt-click-and-wait-guessing while using the mouse on this hardware, mainly while waiting for Chrome and Libre Office to complete the launch process to startup these apps.