OpenBSD 7.5 Released - Faster Performance For Many-Core ARM Servers

Theo de Raadt has released OpenBSD 7.5 as the newest version of this security-focused BSD operating system. With OpenBSD 7.5 there is a number of improvements for ARM (AArch64) hardware, never-ending kernel optimizations and other tuning work, countless package updates, and other adjustments to this popular BSD platform.

Among the many changes to find with today's OpenBSD 7.5 release are:

- OpenBSD 7.5 on ARM64 adds per-CPU caching for the VP pool and PTE descriptor (PTED) pool in the PMAP implementation to reduce side effects of locking contention on the kernel map lock. In turn this leads to "significant speedups" for many-core ARM64 systems like AArch64 servers.

- SMP improvements with some network timers now running without the kernel lock, bind and connect system calls can now run in parallel, UDP packets can now be sent in parallel by multiple threads, and other changes.

- The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code has been synced against the Linux 6.6.19 upstream state.

- New "ADLDCP" and "APLDRM" drivers for the Apple display co-processor.

- The AMPCHWM driver has been added for Ampere Altra power telemetry support.

- New driver support for the Allwinner D1 and Allwinner H616 SoCs.

- Numerous network driver improvements. On the wireless side there is now a QWX driver that is a port of the Linux Ath11k driver.

- OpenBSD's autoinstall for unattended installations now supports disk encryption both with plain text passphrases or a key disk.

- OpenBSD 7.5 CD and install ISO CD images are now bootable in EFI mode.

- Removed support for the indirection system call and various other system security improvements.

- Numerous package updates and other changes.

Downloads and more details on the big OpenBSD 7.5 operating system release via OpenBSD.org.