OpenBSD 8.0 has arrived, marking the project's 61st release and the continuation of its semiannual release schedule dating back to 1996. What began as a fork of NetBSD more than 30 years ago remains one of the most security-conscious operating systems in active development.
According to the release announcement covered by Ars Technica, founder Theo de Raadt highlighted improvements including support for Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards, a 512GB kernel virtual address space on AMD64 that allows mapping more than 4GB of VRAM, and hibernation support for ARM64 systems. The release also brings updates to LibreSSL 4.4.0 and OpenSSH 10.6, along with additions to the vmm/vmd virtualization stack.
Other changes include RISC-V kernel support for the 'V' vector extension, wireless driver enhancements such as 802.11n and 40 MHz channels for the qwx(4) driver, and support for up to 64 virtual CPUs per guest VM. The project also retired support for the Loongson architecture, which stopped working with the Clang 22 compiler. No other source was included for comparison.