Job Snijders (job@)has added (to -current) a new utility,watch(1),for periodically executing a command and displaying its output.TheIIJ'siwatchwas initiallyimportedback in May, and has beenreworked substantiallybefore beinglinked to the build.
Yes, you read that right:KDE 6.4.0 Plasmais now in OpenBSD packages.This was made possible by the efforts of Rafael Sadowski (rsadowski@) with the help of several others.The news was announced 2025-07-04 via afediverse postand of course thecommit messageitself, where the description reads
In a fediverse post,Stefan Sperling (stsp@) asks for testing of a potential fixfor a problem affecting a number of network interface drivers(namely bge,bnx,iavf,igc,ix,ixl,ngbe andpcn),pointing to amessageon tech@ with the subjectbge/bnx/iavf/igc/ix/ixl/ngbe/pcn: ifq_restart() fix that reads
In some cases, the currentdhcpd(8)is not quite as reliable as one would want in providing the requesteddata to the actual requestor.After some rounds of discussion and experimentation,David Gwynne (dlg@) is circulating adiffon tech@ that switches the daemon to useUDPsockets instead ofbpf.The motivation is summarized as,
Kristaps Dzonsons(known formandoc(1),rpki-client(8),and much more)has written an article,Source code sandboxing,on sandboxingfrom the perspective of developers.It compares the facilities available under severaloperating systems, and requests relevantcontributions.As Undeadly readers might expect, OpenBSD'spledge(2)andunveil(2)receive favourable appraisal.Kristaps' article refers toSandboxing Adoption in Open Source Ecosystems,an academic article published on the subject.[In 2016, Undeadly publishedKristaps Dzonsons on pledge(2).]
Following adiscussion on tech@[initiated by a post with patch from Ted Unangst (tedu@)],the"TearFree" option has beenbackportedto the xenocaramodesetting(4)driver in -current:
Rafael Sadowski (rsadowski@),OpenBSD developer and prolific blogger,has been looking into file system performance optimizations on our favoriteoperating system, and is now sharing his tips and tricks inFFS optimizations with dirhash on his blog. He leads in with a TL;DR:
Reining in file system access is hard to get right, even forOpenBSD developers. In a message to tech@ titledopenat(2) is mostly useless, sadlyTheo de Raadt (deraadt@) describes how theopenat(2)family of system calls has failed to live up to expectations in practice,and he proposes changes that may improve the situation.Theo writes,
Recently, Crystal Kolipe found that attachingsoftraidvolumes as read-only devices did not work.Then what to do?Fix the code and make it work, of course!The full story is available asStay, (write), protected!",taking us through the steps of adding a feature toOpenBSD. Enjoy!
A new profiling subsystem is now in OpenBSD-current, from the hands of none other than Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) himself.A longish sequence of commitsintroducedthechangesincrementally,with asummary as follows:
Are you an OpenBSD user with a low power device such as aPC EnginesAPU2,with one or moreem(4)network interfaces?Darren Tucker (dtucker@) has a new diff out that may be of use to you,posted in amessageto tech@:
Our favorite operating system is in the process of aquiring Encapsulated Remote Switch Port Analyzer (ERSPAN) support, in the form of a new virtual network interface, dubbed erspan(4).An early version of the code, but possibly close to being ready for further development in-tree waspresentedby David Gwynne (dlg@) in amessage to tech@:
A longdiscussionon tech@(initiated by asuggestion/patch from Jesper Wallin)has culminated in Damien Miller (djm@)committingchanges which increase security by taking advantage of the use ofunveil(2)elsewhere in the OpenBSD ecosystem:
Klemens Nanni (kn@) hascommittedthe his proposed change[Seeprevious article]such that theOpenBSD installer now prefers disks over 1GBwhen prompting for the root disk.The commit message explains the change:
You can tell it's right after a release is cut when new ideas are fielded in patches to tech@.One such small but potentially important change that is being aired now is achangeto the installer to suggest the larger one when several disks are available. Klemens Nanni (kn@) describes the motivation for the change as
In apostto tech@,Martin Pieuchot (mpi@)has requested testing of a diff (against -current) to enablerunning the upper part of the fault handler in parallel:
As we saw recently in theGraphed and measured: running TCP input in parallelstory, Alexander Bluhm (bluhm@) has been working on parallel TCP input, finally making tcp_input() MP-safe.This work has now beencommitted,
The OpenBSD project hasannouncedOpenBSD 7.7,its 58 release.The new releasecontains a number of significant improvements, including but certainlynot limited to:
Our favorite operating system may be on the verge of having a LLDP(Link Layer Discovery Protocol)daemon added to the base system. David Gwynne (dlg@) is circulating a patch on tech@ that introduces the daemon,
Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) updated the versionofOpenBSD-current to "7.7-current".Those running the latest-and-greatest[via a sufficiently new snapshot or built from source]no longer need to use"-D snap" withpkg_add(1)(andpkg_info(1)).
If you have ever been irked by having to enter a sequence of sysctl(8) commands to achieve things like enabling forwarding for IPv4 and IPv6 both, help is at hand.In a recent commit, Klemens Nanni (kn@) added functionality to have the classic command read multiple settings from a file:
We (undeadly.org editors) had not noticed ourselves, but Will Backman wrote in about the news that some OpenBSD code -- openrsync -- had been made available to a wider audience, courtesy of Apple:
TheOpenBSD7.7 release cycle is entering its final phases...With the followingcommit,Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) moved -current to version 7.7(dropping the "-beta"):
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