OpenBSD 7.2 Released With Support For Ampere Altra, Apple M2

[stormcrow]

As of today (Oct 22, 2022), AMD RX 6650XT cards are unsupported in OpenBSD 7.2. Found out that the driver they import from Linux is still too old to properly support them. It turns up as unknown AMD device in the boot info scroll. Ah well. It will be in time as the the Linux driver eventually trickles down to the BSDs.

I didn't buy it for OpenBSD anyway. That's pretty much swatting a fly with a nuke. I got it for a good price as an upgrade. I'm happy with it since I only use OpenBSD to dabble with. Windows and Mint (21) support it very well so long as you make sure your Linux-firmware package is up-to-date.

EDIT TO ADD: This isn't correct. OpenBSD 7.2 does have support for AMD RX 6650XT cards. It turns out they are still identified as "ATI" by dmesg/pcidump, despite the brand name not being used in many years, instead of "AMD" which is what I was looking for and didn't think to grep for "ATI". Installing the system then starting up X resulted in the expected desktop and GLXGears worked fine as an initial diagnostic.

[Danielsan]

Upgrading OpenBSD is a breeze, never seen anything simpler and easier!

[brad0]

QEMU but it was slower than molasses in sub-zero weather

QEMU is an emulator. Of course it is.

[kylew77]

OpenBSD releases currently remind me of old Ubuntu releases, they cram so much improvements in 6 months. Hey Michael can we see the benchmarks of the 7.1 to 7.2 improvements pretty please? As a premium supporter request.

[kylew77]

Thanks for that. According to their FAQ, vmm doesn't have graphics abilities right now -- something I really need when developing and testing in Windows VMs. One of these days, I hope!

I too hope that someone smart enough comes along to add graphics support to VMM. I've read some OpenBSD source code and I am not even smart enough to implement their implementation of cat, like literally the most simple cli utility. It would be so nice to run a Windows VM in OpenBSD.

[willbprog177]

OpenBSD has vmm for virtual machines. I don’t know how useful it is for your use cases. Look it up in the docs.

Thanks for that. According to their FAQ, vmm doesn't have graphics abilities right now -- something I really need when developing and testing in Windows VMs. One of these days, I hope!

[stormcrow]

Very nice! I would be using OpenBSD right now if there was a reliable and performant way to run virtual machines. Last time I tried OpenBSD, there was QEMU but it was slower than molasses in sub-zero weather without any kernel support. I understand why it's not included, it just stinks.

OpenBSD has vmm for virtual machines. I don’t know how useful it is for your use cases. Look it up in the docs.

[willbprog177]

Very nice! I would be using OpenBSD right now if there was a reliable and performant way to run virtual machines. Last time I tried OpenBSD, there was QEMU but it was slower than molasses in sub-zero weather without any kernel support. I understand why it's not included, it just stinks.

[Classical]

The M2 chips were released just 4 months ago so it's nice that they have initial support.
I do think that the graphics drivers for this chip still need quite a bit of work. Also on Linux they are not that far yet.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenBSD 7.2 Released With Support For Ampere Altra, Apple M2

Coming on the same day as Ubuntu 22.10, Theo de Raadt has released OpenBSD 7.2 as the latest version of this popular BSD operating system...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenBSD-7.2-Released