Happy to see that OpenBSD 7.7 is officially released! What’s new? More than I’ll even try to list here. Well… that’s a lie! I’ve got to mention some of it.
Personally, I was definitely pleased to see amongst the changes there are lots of kernel improvements. Many SMP enhancments, New AMDGPU hardware supported, as-well as Intel Arrow Lake. Perhaps post exciting is they’ve updated DRM to Linux 6.12.21. Also
acpipci now active on hypervisors, resolving longstanding SeaBIOS/qemu issues
Ten highlights from the 7.7 Release include:
- Enabled AP power state initialization fix for M1 MacBook on latest firmware.
- Implemented support for ARM64 SVE (Scalable Vector Extension).
- Added AMD SEV guest boot support on QEMU with EFI and SEV firmware management via psp(4).
- Unlocked TCP output, timers, and accept(2) — significantly improving SMP scalability and parallelism for TCP workloads.
- Updated Direct Rendering Manager (drm(4)) to Linux 6.12.21, with new hardware support for AMD Ryzen AI 300, Navi 48 GPUs, and Intel Arrow Lake.
- Improved out-of-memory (OOM) handling and made page daemon operations more efficient.
- Implemented per-CPU ringbuffers for dt(4) and extended btrace(8) with additional units and multiline script support.
- Introduced kern.audio.kbdcontrol sysctl(2) to optionally treat multimedia keyboard volume keys as regular keys.
- Allowed sysctl(8) to apply settings from a file in one command with
-f, simplifying rc(8) startup. - Enabled shared netlocks for TCP send/recv system calls — improving multi-threaded network performance.