OpenBSD 6.6

[oil25]

I've really been enjoying using OpenBSD full time, both on my desktop (AMD Ryzen build) as well as laptops (Lenovo X230, X1 Carbon). Everything literally "just works", the documentation is impeccable, and I love being able to install a new kernel and base system with one simple command ("sysupgrade"). About the only thing I still use Linux for is a browser with U2F support and Bluetooth - both are disabled in OpenBSD for security.

[messe]

> Bluetooth [is] disabled in OpenBSD for security

A clarification on that point: OpenBSD's bluetooth stack was unmaintained and removed due to code rot; it's not that bluetooth as a protocol is inherently insecure.

[floatboth]

I'm not sure why U2F would be "disabled for security". I guess it's just that nobody has implemented all the required things. For the USB tokens, you need userspace USB HID access and hotplug notifications. I did that in Firefox for FreeBSD :)

[theli0nheart]

Pardon my ignorance, but why would U2F support be disabled for security? Isn't that the entire point of U2F?

[earthscienceman]

This comment is really interesting to me. What wifi chip is in your X1 carbon? I would love to try a BSD on my t480s. What windowing system are you using?

[heinrichhartman]

Very cool! What kind of software do you use on your machines?

- Are you doing docker in a Linux VM?

- Any graphical Applications other than Firefox and emacs?

[asveikau]

I read about the "sysupgrade" tool and concluded that the upgrade to 6.7 in another 6 months will be awfully seamless... But I see from this that they backported the tool as a syspatch for 6.5! So from 6.5 we will be able to do syspatch && sysupgrade to get to 6.6. Sounds nice.

[protomyth]

Tried on one of my machines. Seems to work fine. You still do the delete file step manually but that's minor. This is going to save a lot of effort on certain machines.

[kelp]

You can also do sysupgrade -s to follow current snapshots, and then you get a rolling release OpenBSD without build world.

[snvzz]

>So from 6.5 we will be able to do syspatch && sysupgrade to get to 6.6. Sounds nice.

Do note the steps before starting and the config file changes in the release notes need to be run through manually, before sysupgrade.

And after the new version boots, pkg_add -u.

[tedunangst]

You can also browse the source with the OPENBSD_6_6 tag in cvsweb.

http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/?only_with_tag=...

[gautamcgoel]

Just keeps getting better and better every release. I wish they would add an easy encryption option in the installer. You can enable full disk encryption, but you have to mess with the bioctl settings, which potentially scares off new users.

[hellcow]

To be fair, I've NEVER been able to configure LUKS manually for full-disk encryption, whereas I got bioctl working on the first try. It really is simple.

[snvzz]

There's some hints they plan to do so, in the release notes.

[roryrjb]

Announcement email: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=157132045926047&w=2

[equalunique]

  o Added regular expression support for the format search, match andsubstitute modifiers in tmux(1).
  o Added a -v flag to source-file in tmux(1) to show the commands and line numbers.
  o Added simple menus usable with mouse or keyboard in tmux(1).
  o Introduced the command "display-menu" to show a menu bound to the mouse on status line by default, and added menus in tree, client and buffer modes.
  o Changed the behavior of swap-window -d in tmux(1) to match swap-pane.
  o Allow panes to be empty in tmux(1), and enabling output to be piped to them with split-window or display-message -I.
  o Adjusted tmux(1) to automatically scroll when dragging to create a selection with the mouse when the cursor reaches the top or bottom line.
  o Fixed a tmux(1) crash when killing the current window, and other bugfixes.

Would love to see a demo of these cool now tmux features. (sorry, I don't really know how to format that email text for HN)

[floatboth]

> ssh-keygen(1): add an experimental lightweight signature and verification ability. Signatures may be made using regular ssh keys held on disk or stored in a ssh-agent and verified against an authorized_keys-like list of allowed keys. Signatures embed a namespace that prevents confusion and attacks between different usage domains (e.g. files vs email).

Nice! I hope this will eventually be used for various signature systems like for git commits.

[wglb]

> Fixed support for amd64 machines with greater than 1023GB physical memory.

Don't I wish. What would be the memory test time for something like that?

[ranger207]

I recently set up a Dell workstation with that much memory for a lab at work. The first time I booted it I was afraid that it was dead out of the box. It probably took ~5 minutes to POST and get to the Dell logo. Dells also have this weird thing where they turn on for a couple of seconds after you turn on the power, and it took me half an hour to figure out why it kept shutting down when I tried to boot it.

[dsr_]

By linear extrapolation, about 7 minutes per terabyte on an EPYC 7402, which can handle up to 4 TB.

Attempts to justify new init software by "it boots much faster" fall flat.

[baq]

i've got servers just out of 5-year warranty with 768GB of RAM factory installed. they tend to take a while to boot but they aren't rebooted often enough to remember how long the POST takes.

[sogubsys]

If you support OpenBSD in spirit and love what they do, consider making a donation to help the developers out. Most devs work for free and every little bit helps :)

https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html

[grenoire]

Love the release poster for this one.

[riffraff]

I cannot understand the poster this time. I have actual problems identifying the elements: I see puffy at the top, a couple demonettes on the left, and a mask (?) in the bottom right, but everything else seems a mess. And I don't get what it refers to.

Is it a reference to some pop or niche culture bit ? Is it "6.6 is almost 666, so, devils"?

[xyproto]

It can easily be misread as "OpenBSD la.la", though.

[darkengine]

Is there any way to buy a print, or get a high-quality image for printing at home? The expanded version on the website is a pretty gnarly non-animated GIF.

[catalogia]

It reminds me of something I'd see in Heavy Metal magazine, when that was still a thing. It's really cool.

[jolmg]

That's pretty cool. I didn't know they made posters for each release. The one for 6.4 is also pretty cool.

[sigjuice]

The OpenBSD developers are not too thrilled to hear about these sorts of issues, but looks like sysupgrade installed sets I didn't have before (x*66.tgz, game66.tgz).

[chousuke]

It does that. You can hack the script to only install partial sets, but you're encouraged to install all the sets. I've seen at least one mention on the mailing list about merging the sets because the recommendation is to always install all of them anyway. They're just files on disk if you're not using them.

[kelp]

If you hadn't seen it, you may find this recent discussion about sysupgrade informative: https://marc.info/?t=156851721400002&r=1&w=2

And yeah, you're right, even light criticism on the OpenBSD lists is met with a very strong and negative reaction. That said, I think improvement suggestions that come with a diff and a constructive attitude are generally well received.

Also sysupgrade is a pretty brief ksh script, so fairly easy to see what it's doing.

[pnako]

OpenBSD developers have not really made it official but basically you're supposed to install them all. Theo has hinted at merging them before.

syspatch(8) also assumed them to be installed IIRC.

[ectospheno]

I suppose you could just keep posting this until they follow through with their idea of having only one set to prevent people like you from complaining about this non issue. Or do you think being passive aggressive on hacker news is going to change their collective, long held stance on this issue?

[asveikau]

In the 90s disks were smaller and it might have made more sense to exclude compilers or exclude X. I used to not put X on headless machines. But today disk space is big and cheap.

[justinclift]

> Added mcx(4) driver for Mellanox ConnectX-4 (and later) Ethernet controllers.

Interesting. Sounds like work is being done to support higher network throughput rates. :)

[upofadown]

Just a reminder: you still have to read the preupgrade stuff before and do the manual file deletion stuff afterwards even if you do sysupgrade. Most will need to do the pkg_add -u after all that. Here is the link (I always have to look for it):

* https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade66.html

[linfocito]

There is 'sysclean' in packages, which make that step easier.

[larme]

ghc bumped to 8.6.4 and sbcl with threading support!

[cik]

I still desperately want docker support. I know I can bhive and friends - but native docker support is critical to my every day, unfortunately. Heck, I'll take super decayed docker support!

[messe]

> bhive

bhyve is FreeBSD, not OpenBSD. OpenBSD has its own native hypervisor "vmm".

[gautamcgoel]

Can OpenBSD run Sway? Or is that only supported on FreeBSD/Linux?

[floatboth]

It can't really (other than inside an x11 window maybe), not in its current state. I've heard that someone was working on some Wayland porting efforts, but idk about the state of that.

Looks like OpenBSD has a fairly up to date kms/drm stack now, but you also need:

- to have epoll - https://github.com/jiixyj/epoll-shim might just work

- to expose input devices from the kernel as evdev devices (good idea) or to implement support for your legacy protocol in wlroots / in other places for other compositors (terrible idea)

- to have a device enumeration and hotplug system and either have it pretending it's udev (as we do with https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/libudev-devd) or implement support for it in wlroots and everywhere

- direct session glue code at least e.g. https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/blob/master/backend/sessio...

- but ideally, a working session manager that supports acquiring drm+evdev devices over d-bus e.g. https://github.com/ConsoleKit2/ConsoleKit2/pull/116 && https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/pull/1467

[efiecho]

Can't wait to try if this release will improve wireless performance when configured as an AP, until now I have never been able to get speeds above 10 Mbps with OpenBSD.

[kelp]

OpenBSD only supports 802.11n currently. From what I've read, not having direct knowledge, 802.11ac is much more complex to implement and no one is currently working on it.

That said, I just ran a speed test on my Thinkpad and got 50Mbps.

[MuffinFlavored]

> Disabled gcc in base on armv7 and i386.

Is gcc disabled in base on amd64? Are the OpenBSD distributions for amd64 compiled with gcc or clang?

[brynet]

gcc is still included in base on amd64 for now, but the default system compiler on amd64 (and i386) has been clang since OpenBSD 6.2. If you use the /usr/bin/{cc,c++} symlinks, you get clang. Nothing uses the base-gcc now, but it being kept as a convenience for porters to test with as some architectures have yet to switch to clang.

The change mentioned is only that gcc4 (base-gcc) will no longer been installed alongside clang on i386 and armv7. If you need gcc, you can install ports gcc 8.3.0 from packages.

[sogubsys]

Thanks to all the OpenBSD developers and supporters for making another amazing release!

[vkaku]

Now that they have the amdgpu driver in, it's time to run this on my Ryzen box.

[sn]

prgmr.com has an updated netboot installer: https://prgmr.com/blog/2019/10/17/openbsd.html