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.

Most notable with OpenBSD 7.2 is now supporting Ampere Altra Arm server processors. After the great success of Ampere Altra on Linux and the success of Altra / Altra Max in the marketplace with being picked up by various public cloud service providers and other organizations, the various BSDs have been working on on Ampere Altra support. OpenBSD 7.2 also contains initial support for Apple's M2 SoCs with that reverse-engineering and driver writing work going in-hand with the work being done by Linux developers too on Apple M1/M2 support. Rounding out the exciting Arm enablement work in OpenBSD 7.2 is getting initial support for the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Arm laptop and other hardware making use of the high-end Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 SoC.

OpenBSD 7.2's official release logo... Playing off Dr. Seuss.

In addition to the Apple M2 and Ampere Altra targets seeing initial support, some of the other OpenBSD 7.2 changes include:

- A number of different SMP kernel improvements.

- New hardware drivers for various Apple, Qualcomm, SiFive, StarFive, and Allwinner ASICs / IP blocks.

- Support for Intel AX210 / AX211 WiFi chipsets.

- Privilege separation has been added to more components along with a variety of other security improvements.

- Updating the DRM display driver support against that of Linux 5.15.69 and also enabling Intel DRM driver support for both Alder Lake and Raptor Lake.

- Support for up to 256 CPU cores for OpenBSD ARM64 builds.

- Various CPU frequency scaling improvements.

- Enabling kstat in the kernel that exports kernel statistics to be read by the kstat utility.

Downloads and more details on all the changes with OpenBSD 7.2 can be found via OpenBSD.org.