OpenBSD 7.7 Released with Significant Performance & Security Enhancements

OpenBSD 7.7, the 58th release of the security-focused operating system, was officially launched on April 28, 2025. This release substantially improves multiple areas, including performance optimization, hardware support, and security enhancements. The new version features notable performance improvements, particularly on ARM64 architecture, where the PMAP teardown has been optimized by skipping TLB flushes, resulting in […] The post OpenBSD 7.7 Released with Significant Performance & Security Enhancements appeared first on Cyber Security News.

Apr 29, 2025 - 16:35

OpenBSD 7.7 Released with Significant Performance & Security Enhancements

OpenBSD 7.7, the 58th release of the security-focused operating system, was officially launched on April 28, 2025. This release substantially improves multiple areas, including performance optimization, hardware support, and security enhancements.

The new version features notable performance improvements, particularly on ARM64 architecture, where the PMAP teardown has been optimized by skipping TLB flushes, resulting in approximately 5% faster kernel builds.

For AMD64 systems, OpenBSD 7.7 now supports running as an AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) guest on QEMU with EFI, strengthening virtualization security.

One of the most significant advancements in the networking stack is the parallel execution of TCP output and TCP timers. This improvement allows multiple userland threads to work on different sockets simultaneously, substantially enhancing network throughput and responsiveness.

According to the developers, UDP and IPv6 TCP output have seen a 20% performance increase through improved traffic distribution across queues.

Hardware support has been expanded to include the latest processors and graphics cards, including AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series (Strix Point, Strix Halo, Krackan Point), Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards, and Intel’s Arrow Lake processors. The Direct Rendering Manager and graphics drivers have been updated to align with Linux kernel 6.12.21.

For USB device users, version 7.7 introduces USB 3.0 speed support to the xhci(4) and uvideo(4) drivers, addressing longstanding performance limitations.

New network hardware drivers have also been added, including ice(4) for Intel E810 Ethernet devices and ixv(4) for virtual functions of Intel 82598EB, 82559, and X540 controllers.

Security remains a cornerstone of OpenBSD, with this release implementing the separation of the user authentication code from the sshd-session binary into a dedicated sshd-auth binary.

This architectural change ensures that the pre-authentication attack surface has an entirely separate address space from the code handling the rest of the connection.

The system ships with OpenSSH 10.0, which now defaults to using the hybrid post-quantum algorithm mlkem768x25519-sha256 for key agreement. This algorithm is designed to resist potential attacks by quantum computers while maintaining backward compatibility with current security standards.

Installation and upgrade processes have been simplified with improvements to sysupgrade(8), which now supports specific release version targeting and offline upgrades from filesets stored on a filesystem.

Additionally, fw_update(8) has been enhanced to support firmware downloads without root privileges and includes new options for driver detection.

OpenBSD 7.7 offers an impressive collection of pre-built packages across various architectures, with amd64 leading at 12,593 packages. The release includes current versions of popular software such as Firefox 137.0, Thunderbird 128.9.0, GNOME 47, and KDE Plasma 6.3.3.

For developers, the system provides LibreSSL 4.1.0 with numerous internal improvements and optimizations, including new SHA-1, SHA-256, and SHA-512 assembly implementations for amd64 that leverage SHA-NI instructions when available.

Users interested in upgrading can follow the detailed instructions in the upgrade guide, with most able to use the streamlined sysupgrade(8) utility for a smooth transition from version 7.6.

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