OpenBSD 5.7 Is Less Than One Month Out & Finally Has USB 3.0

OpenBSD 5.7 is planned for release in less than one month and it will be presenting a number of new features for this security-minded BSD operating system.

When it comes to hardware support, the biggest feature of the 5.7 release is almost certainly... USB 3.0. Finally, OpenBSD will have full USB 3.0 support via a new XHCI driver added to the OpenBSD kernel. The OpenBSD USB 3.0 support has come years after it arrived on Linux, but at least it's finally here. USB 3.0 products have been out since 2009, which is also when the Linux kernel added their USB 3.0 support with Linux 2.6.31.

OpenBSD 5.7 also has a new "IWM" driver for supporting Intel 7265/7260/3160 WiFi adapters and updates to many other existing drivers for providing new hardware support. The RS* Radeon IGPs should also now be working with the OpenBSD's Radeon DRM driver.

OpenBSD 5.7 also now compiles the RAMdisk binary without any optimizations and security features to yield a much smaller binary and thus allow for more features going forward. OpenBSD 5.7 also removes Nginx from OpenBSD base in favor of the OpenBSD's own httpd server.

OpenBSD 5.7 also does away with procfs support and loadable kernel modules -- among other improvements done in the name of security.

The official list of OpenBSD 5.7 changes so far can be found via the tentative release page at OpenBSD.org. OpenBSD 5.7 is planned for release on 1 May.