OpenBSD 8.0 beefs up virtual machines and gets a taste of Wine

OpenBSD 8.0 brings bigger virtual machines, graphics improvements, and another helping of AI mockery.

The round version number doesn't signal a radical break with its predecessors.

OpenBSD 8.0 is the 61st release of the project.

Developer Bryan Steele posted a highlights rundown on Mastodon.

Wireless improvements include updates to the qwx driver for Qualcomm Wi-Fi 6 hardware.

Its VMM/VMD hypervisor now supports multiprocessor VMs with up to 64 virtual CPUs in each guest.

The kernel virtual memory address space on x86-64 is now 512 GB, up from 4 GB, allowing for GPUs with large amounts of VRAM.

On Arm64 machines, OpenBSD supports hibernation, and on both x86-64 and Arm64 it can use CPU AES instructions for faster encrypted swap.

Component upgrades include OpenSSH 10.6 and LibreSSL 4.4.0, and the DRM graphics driver stack from Linux 6.18.

The default C compiler is Clang/LLVM 22, including for the SPARC64 edition – but at the cost of dropping support for the Loongson architecture.

The list of errata is short, with just four fixes – but then, version 8.0 is very new.

Just days before this release, there was a high-profile OpenBSD issue: Calif's "Big Fish" research describes a decades-old shared-memory bug chained with a separate kernel flaw to gain local root access.

Both were fixed in OpenBSD 7.9 , through errata 026 and 018 respectively.

Project leader Theo de Raadt forked OpenBSD from NetBSD 1.0 in 1995, and the first release of the new OS was OpenBSD 1.2 in July 1996 – so version 8.0 is as close as the project will get to a 30th anniversary release.