OpenBSD 7.8 Released: Massive Performance Boost with Parallel TCP Stack and Raspberry Pi 5 Support
On October 22, 2025, OpenBSD 7.8 was released —the project’s 59th stable edition, once again featuring the pufferfish as its emblem. The new version is now available on official mirrors, accompanied by updated errata and changelog pages.
The most significant improvement is the transition to multithreaded processing for the network stack and system calls. Functions such as TCP, IPv6 fragmentation, and system operations like close() and listen() can now run concurrently across multiple cores. This has substantially increased performance on multi-threaded systems and improved load distribution efficiency within the scheduler.
OpenBSD 7.8 also introduces full support for Raspberry Pi 5, including drivers for RP1 controllers, RTC, GPIO, and PWM, as well as enhanced Wi-Fi and SDHC functionality. On Snapdragon X Elite chips, apm and hw.cpuspeed now work correctly, while power events and sleep recovery have been fixed for AMD-based laptops.
For virtualized environments, OpenBSD now supports AMD SEV-ES, a secure virtualization technology. The system can operate as both host and guest in confidential mode compatible with KVM/QEMU. Guest memory management has been migrated to UVM-aobjs, and Virtio drivers have been updated to version 1.2.
The graphics subsystem has been upgraded to DRM 6.12.50, adding new Snapdragon drivers (qcdrm(4) and qcdpc(4)) and improving compatibility with modern GPUs. Laptop users will also benefit from fixes for hibernation, USB ports, and display restoration after sleep.
The release includes several new and enhanced utilities: watch(1) from IIJ’s iwatch, a faster pkgconf 2.4.3 replacing the old Perl script, a reworked gprof based on the profil(2) system call, and notable improvements to fdisk(8), apmd(8), and ksh(1). Bugs affecting vi(1) and grep(1) have been corrected to ensure full POSIX compliance.
Security has also received significant attention. The kernel now places guard pages between the stack and PCB, extends pledge(2) restrictions, and runs fc-cache(1) and mkfontscale(1) as unprivileged users. OpenSSH 10.2 introduces warnings about weak (non-post-quantum) algorithms and relocates agent sockets from /tmp to ~/.ssh/agent.
The integrated LibreSSL 4.2.0 brings re-engineered AES and ECC algorithms, constant-time operations, and early support for the upcoming hybrid X25519MLKEM768 standard. Updated packages include Chromium 141, GNOME 48, KDE 6.4.5, Python 3.12.11, Rust 1.90, and PostgreSQL 17.6.
As always, the release is accompanied by numerous minor fixes, documentation updates, and stability improvements. Installation images are available for all platforms, including amd64, arm64, riscv64, and powerpc64, with setup instructions provided in the corresponding INSTALL files.
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