OpenBSD 7.0, the 51st release of the UNIX-like operating system, was outed on October 14, 2021, with the introduction of 64-bit RISC-V support for HiFive Unmatched and PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit boards, as well as further improvements to ARM64 targets, notably for Apple Silicon Macs, although it’s not quite ready for general use yet.
You’ll find the complete list of new features and updates on the OpenBSD website, but here are some of the highlights:
- New platforms – OpenBSD 7.0 add 64-bit RISC-V support
- Extended platforms
- arm64
- Improvements to Apple Silicon Macs support USB 3, NVMe storage, GPIO driver, power management, etc…
- Enabled LEDs for the LAN7800 chip as found on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+.
- Added Type-C PHY controller found on the Rockchip RK3399.
- Implemented multicast support to Marvell ARMADA chips
- Various other changes to mips64, amd64, armv7, powerpc64
- arm64
- Kernel improvements
- Enabled dynamic tracker (dt) for GENERIC kernels on amd64, arm64, i386, sparc64, and powerpc64.
- Added kprobes provider for dt
- Identify TPM 2.0 devices and perform the 2.0-specific suspend command, allowing the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 and ThinkPad X1 Nano with the latest BIOS (which added S3) to resume.
- Various other changes and fixes
- Various SMP Improvements
- Direct Rendering Manager
- Updated drm to Linux 5.10.65
- Better support for Intel Tiger Lake GPUs
- Support for AMD Navi 12, Navi 21 “Sienna Cichlid”, Arcturus, Cezanne “Green Sardine” Ryzen 5000 APU
- Wired networking
- Added the uaq driver for Aquantia AQC111U/AQC112U USB Ethernet devices.
- Added the aq driver to support Aquantia 1/2.5/5/10Gb/s PCIe Ethernet adapters.
- Added driver for Cadence GEM.
- Added support for Broadcom BCM5725
- Added support for RTL8168FP/RTL8111FP/RTL8117
- Various fixes
- Wireless networking
- Added 802.11n Tx aggregation support
- Plenty of bug fixes and security improvements
- Many more
There are many other changes listed on OpenBSD website. If you’d like to give it a try on your platform, you can check out the index of /pub/OpenBSD/7.0/, select the architecture of the target board, e.g. arm64, riscv64, amd64, etc… and then open the install.ARCH file for installation instructions.
Via Liliputing
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress
a truly modern OS 🙂 I’d guess that by 2030 we’ll have 802.11ac support (aka wifi 5)
I’m pretty sure 802.11ac is already implemented :). “Tx aggregation support” was just one feature missing from 802.11n.
Its not, you can use an ac chipset but it runs on n