OpenBSD Marks 25th Anniversary By Releasing OpenBSD 6.8 With POWER 64-Bit Support

It was in October 1995 that Theo de Raadt began the OpenBSD project as a fork of NetBSD 1.0 following his resignation from the NetBSD core development team. Now twenty-five years later OpenBSD 6.8 has been released for marking the 25th anniversary of this popular BSD distribution.

Besides being a commemorative release for the 25 year milestone, OpenBSD 6.8 has some interesting changes:

- POWER 64-bit is now supported including POWER8 and POWER9 CPUs. In particular, the Raptor Computing Systems' Talos II and Blackbird libre hardware now works with OpenBSD 6.8.

- Support for time-counting in userland to eliminate the need for context switching whenever a process needs the current time. This can yield a speed and responsiveness improvement for many real-world software packages. The userland timecounters are working in v6.8 for 64-bit x86, ARM64, POWERPC, OCTEON, and SPARC64 platforms.

- Improved CPU frequency scaling in the automatic performance mode by not accounting for offline CPUs.

- Scrollback support in the SimpleFB frame-buffer code.

- Support for the NVMe driver on i386.

- A new driver for supporting backlight brightness controls on Intel-powered Apple systems.

- Updating the DRM graphics driver code against Linux 5.7.19.

- Various ARM Rockchip improvements.

- Support for the Intel WiFi AX201 hardware in the IWX driver.

- Various FFS2 file-system improvements including greater reliability for very large file-systems and greater speed of checking FFS2 file-systems.

More details on this big OpenBSD 6.8 release via OpenBSD.org.