OpenBSD 7.6, the release in which every single line of the original code form the first release has been edited or removed, has been released. There’s a lot of changes, new features, bug fixes, and more in 7.6, but for desktop users, the biggest new feature is undoubtedly hardware-accelerated video decoding through VA-API. Or, as the changelog puts it:
Imported libva 2.22.0, an implementation for VA-API (video acceleration API). VA-API provides access to graphics hardware acceleration capabilities for video processing.
↫ OpenBSD 7.6 release announcement
This is a massive improvement for anyone using OpenBSD for desktop use, especially on power-constrained devices like laptops. Problematic video playback was one of the reasons I went back to Fedora KDE after running OpenBSD on my workstation, and it seems this would greatly improve that situation. I can’t wait until I find some time to reinstall OpenBSD and see how much difference this will make for me personally.
There’s more, of course. OpenBSD 7.6 starts the bring-up for Snapdragon X Elite devices, and in general comes with a whole slew of low-level improvements for the ARM64 architecture. AMD64 systems don’t have to feel left out, thanks to AVX-512 support, several power management improvements to make sleep function more optimally, and several other low-level improvements I don’t fully understand. RISC-V, PowerPC, MIPS, and other architectures also saw small numbers of improvements.
The changelog is vast, so be sure to dig through it to see if your pet bug has been addressed, or support for your hardware has been improved. OpenBSD users will know how to upgrade, and for new installations, head on over to the download page.
I noticed a version bump in openbsd today so I created another image for the ARM version for UTM. https://github.com/sysaulab/UTMBSD
> the release in which every single line of the original code form the first release has been edited or removed
A statement that completely blows the changes out of all proportion, it makes it sound like drastic changes were recently made. It is a slow accumulation of changes with a final change that is noteworthy but only for trivia’s sake.
I do like these upgrades when:
Files to remove
Nothing to remove this release
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade76.html
Interesting, I didn’t know they had people interested in that, but they now support AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV).
Even in the hypervisor of OpenBSD itself, even though they don’t even support a graphical console (yet?), only way you can use it is with serial console or over the network. Or even live migration of VMs, etc. And no nested virtualization either. So you are limited on how you can use it. Having OpenBSD as a hypervisor might sounds like a good choice from a security perspective, but not performance or storage or features like live migration. So guess not in practice.
The release notes state that every _file_ has been updated, modified or replaced. While still impressive, it’s not the same as every line.
Am I the only that miss songs?