OpenBSD 7.8

2 weeks ago 1

OpenBSD 7.8

Terraodontidae Released Oct 22, 2025. (59th OpenBSD release)
Copyright 1997-2025, Theo de Raadt.

Artwork by XXX.

  • See the information on the FTP page for a list of mirror machines.
  • Go to the pub/OpenBSD/7.8/ directory on one of the mirror sites.
  • Have a look at the 7.8 errata page for a list of bugs and workarounds.
  • See a detailed log of changes between the 7.7 and 7.8 releases.
  • signify(1) pubkeys for this release:
    openbsd-78-base.pub: RWS3/nvFmk4SWSmt/5QIk9yB4+uoAGoiYvFhVlDQBG3rWENeeIys0LWB
    openbsd-78-fw.pub: RWSFPOE2F7PQul5Fu/3G/JKMmqJD76vKKQh30UrwSslcMcU5/MEBVqTd
    openbsd-78-pkg.pub: RWRdSyJORZBFeOu7a8K3nODBr9GrFJlGZUG2j93jDSds8Zc+NLTP8v60
    openbsd-78-syspatch.pub: RWRYSW9gIG/XToA9BM+s+ehGgxdWe0+ZShwt85+/dFXYOZFRUi4uqhiR

All applicable copyrights and credits are in the src.tar.gz, sys.tar.gz, xenocara.tar.gz, ports.tar.gz files, or in the files fetched via ports.tar.gz.

What's New

This is a partial list of new features and systems included in OpenBSD 7.8. For a comprehensive list, see the changelog leading to 7.8.

  • Platforms specific improvements:
    • arm64:
      • Added support for Raspberry Pi 5 (with console on serial port).
      • Implement acpicpu(4) for arm64.
      • On Apple variants, enter DDB when exuart(4) detects a BREAK.
      • On arm64 and riscv64, avoid multiple threads of a process continuously faulting on a single page when pmap_enter(9) is asked to enter a mapping that already exists.
      • Make apm and hw.cpuspeed work on Snapdragon X Elite machines.
    • amd64:
      • Fix processing of GPIO events for pin numbers less than 256 with an _EVT method. Fixes power button on various ThinkPads with AMD CPUs.
    • Other architectures:
      • Added a sparc64-specific _raw flavour to the softintr routines for those drivers that need to be able to schedule soft interrupts at actual hardware levels.
    • More platform specific changes can be found in the hardware support section below.
  • Various kernel improvements:
    • Set an upper limit on the value of sysctl(2) kern.seminfo.semopm to avoid a possible kernel panic.
    • On arm64, avoid decoding instructions when ELR isn't pointing into the kernel part of the virtual address space and use fault() instead of panic() to provide better error reports.
    • Inherit PS_NOBTCFI at fork(2) so forked children do not get killed by BTCFI safeguards.
    • Inherit PS_PROFILE at fork(2). This lets child processes disable/reenable profiling when they deemed appropriate.
    • Implement the POSIX-2024 close-on-fork flag, but modified to be reset on exec as preserving it across exec is not necessary for its original purpose and has security and usability concerns.
    • Improve handling of lock nesting by witness(4).
    • Add MI high-level software interrupt dispatcher, providing a common subsystem for the high-level allocation, scheduling, and dispatching of soft interrupts.
    • Remove the functionality of fs.posix.setuid sysctl.
    • Use a FIFO queue for passing dead threads to the reaper, reducing latency with large numbers of CPUs and jobs.
    • Skip filesystem mount time update in BOOT kernels to enable crude timekeeping across reboots without RTC and NTP.
    • Move the kernel to using nanoseconds for the sleep time argument instead of ticks. Userland functions don't change but precision is no longer lost converting nanoseconds into ticks.
    • Show SEV or SEV-ES guest mode in dmesg when running with AMD SEV.
    • Support the GHCB protocol for IO and MMIO with SEV-ES. This makes OpenBSD work with SEV-ES on kvm/qemu in 1-vCPU VMs
    • Add psp(4) ioctl(2) to encrypt and measure state for AMD SEV-ES.
    • Add cpu_xcall(9), an API for CPU xcalls (crosscalls), allowing dispatching of code to run on the specified CPU from an interrupt context.
    • Add dt(4) trace points to rwlock(9).
    • Teach btrace(8) how to resolve addresses in callstacks to symbols.
    • Improve the documentation of dt(4) and btrace(8)
    • Improve compatibility of the FUSE filesystem with the Linux libfuse implementation.
    • Make it possible to run the upper part of the fault handler in parallel.
    • Improve mtx_enter() for machines with a huge number of CPUs.
  • Suspend/Hibernate Support:
    • Preallocate hibernate work area during boot to fix failures where the needed region can't be late-allocated.
    • Implement lid suspend/resume for lids that use a GPIO.
    • Implement support for wakeup interrupts in amdgpio(4), making it possible to resume laptops with AMD CPUs from S0ix suspend.
    • Introduce a generic powerbutton_event() function that does everything we expect from a power button event in a consistent manner, ensuring all drivers now prevent shutdown within the first 10 seconds after resume.
    • Implement a ddb.suspend sysctl that will force "S0ix" suspend and skip suspend of inteldrm(4) and amdgpu(4) such that the display remains on during suspend.
    • Fix dead USB ports after suspend/resume on the ThinkPad Z13.
    • Make amdgpu(4) S3 suspend more reliable.
    • Double the size of the amd64 unhibernate chunk table for machines with large amounts of memory.
  • SMP Improvements:
    • Up to 8 softnet threads are used to handle network input. The number of threads is also limited by the number of CPUs.
    • TCP stack is now running in parallel on multiple CPUs. Up to 8 threads are used to process TCP traffic. Note that each connection can only be handled by one CPU. Use multiple streams and a network interface capable of multi queue to distribute packets.
    • IPv6 fragment reassembly is now running in parallel.
    • IPv6 destination option and routing header parsing is now running in parallel.
    • System calls close(2) and listen(2) run without exclusive net lock.
  • Direct Rendering Manager and graphics drivers:
    • Updated drm(4) to Linux 6.12.50.
    • New qcdrm(4) driver for Qualcomm Snapdragon DRM subsystem.
    • New qcdpc(4) driver for Qualcomm DisplayPort Controller.
  • VMM/VMD improvements:
    • On AMD processors SEV-ES technology is supported to start confidential virtual machines. SEV-ES works with the vmm/vmd hypervisor and with OpenBSD guests on KVM/qemu.
    • Add option for vmd(8) to run guests in AMD SEV-ES mode and keyword "seves" for vm.conf(5) to enable it.
    • Allow SEV-ES enabled guests to run on vmm(4)/vmd(8).
    • Make vmctl(8) show file path in error messages.
    • Sanitize vmd(8)s interprocess communication.
    • Back vmm(4) guest memory with UVM aobjs, simplifying how guest memory is represented and managed.
    • Allow Linux guests to use kvm-clock in vmm(4).
    • Remove vmd(8) send & receive functionality.
    • Prevent vmd(8) guests from reading outside pci config space.
    • Emulate PKRU XSAVE area and features in vmm(4).
    • Update vmd(8)'s emulated Virtio network, block, entropy, and scsi devices to support Virtio 1.2 in non-transitional mode.
  • Various new userland features:
    • Switched pkg-config(1) to the widely used C-based pkgconf 2.4.3 due to major performance issues with the unmaintained homegrown Perl script.
    • Import IIJ's iwatch as watch(1), a utility to periodically execute a command and display its output.
    • security(8) creates backups of GPT/MBR.
    • fdisk(8) -R recovers/creates GPT/MBR from a file.
    • fdisk(8) interactive editor supports one-line partition addition/modification.
    • Add [-w percent] and /etc/apm/warnlow hook to apmd(8).
    • Introduced a new gprof profiling system using profil(2) system call and removed the monstartup(3) interface.
    • Add ibufq(3) API to support multithreaded use of ibufs.
  • More bugfixes and tweaks in userland:
    • As usual, many improvements and corrections in documentation were made.
    • fdisk(8) interactive editor displays verbose information if -v was set.
    • fdisk(8) displays GPT partitions in disk offset order with free areas shown.
    • fdisk(8) can create GPT partitions with any well formed UUID as the type.
    • Only GPT partitions with recognized filesystems are included in the default disklabel(5).
    • Version 0 disklabel(5) no longer supported.
    • Fix a crash in vi(1) when executing commands.
    • Fix vi(1) crash with expandtab and running external commands.
    • Make vi(1) 'p' command paste in the correct place.
    • Improve the flockfile(3) implementation by switching from external locks to per FILE recursive mutexes.
    • Do not log OTP secrets in login_yubikey(8).
    • Change gmtime(3) to return time in UTC rather than GMT, as required by our own manpage, POSIX, C standards, and other OSes.
    • Make exit(), fclose(), fflush(), and freopen() comply with POSIX-2008 requirements for setting the underlying file position when flushing read-mode streams, and make an fseek()-after-fflush() not change the underlying file position.
    • Improve externs for KEYMAPE(), extern in .c files resulted in the use of a wrongly sized anonymous struct.
    • Make bioctl(8) properly indicate key disk for RAID 1C.
    • Fix sign of %z output in zic(8), and add DST offset.
    • Add -t and -V options from tzcode2013d to zdump(8).
    • Fix an rm(1) bug where "mkdir exampledir; ln -s examplelink exampledir; rm examplelink/" didn't remove exampledir like POSIX requires.
    • In ksh(1) VI mode, prevent display corruption when the command line being edited starts with a UTF-8 continuation byte.
    • Make mdoc(7) support the input syntax ".Lb libname [...]" with multiple arguments in the SYNOPSIS.
    • Make sndiod(8) use per-program level controls instead of per-client.
    • Stop tar(1) from exiting silently if the mtime didn't fit in the ustar header when writing out the extended headers.
    • Fix memleak in syslogd(8) when a client aborts a TLS connection, and ensure that syslogd(8) runs TLS handshake callback.
    • Support for embedded PNG bitmaps in Freetype (often used for fonts with colour emoji).
  • Improved hardware support and driver bugfixes, including:
    • New acpiwmi(4) driver for Windows Management Instrumentation.
    • New amdpmc(4) driver for AMD power management controller.
    • New bcmmip driver for BCM2712 MSI controller.
    • New bcmstbgpio(4) driver for Broadcom Set-top Box GPIO controller.
    • New bcmstbintc(4) driver for Broadcom Set-to Box interrupt controller.
    • New bcmstbpinctrl(4) driver for Broadcom Set-top Box pin multiplexing.
    • New bcmstbrescal(4) driver for Broadcom Set-top Box reset calibration controller.
    • New bcmstbreset(4) driver for Broadcom Set-top Box reset controller.
    • New rpone(4) driver for Raspberry Pi RP1 peripheral controller.
    • New rpiclock(4) driver for Raspberry Pi RP1 clock controller.
    • New rpipwm(4) driver for Raspberry Pi RP1 PWM controller.
    • New rpirtc(4) driver for Raspberry Pi real-time clock.
    • New iasuskbd(4) driver for ASUS I2C HID keyboards.
    • Add support for the SDHC controllers found on the Raspberry Pi 5.
    • In virtio(4), allow to use memory above 4G on amd64 for virtio rings and descriptors.
    • Add support for H.264 advanced video coding to uvideo(4).
    • Prevent a kernel panic in wsdisplay(4) when asked to switch VTs during resume.
    • Avoid a use-after-free in psp(4).
    • Do not attach YubiKeys as keyboards anymore in ukbd(4). This disables the OTP functionality, but makes it easier to use the FIDO function without the need to configure the YubiKeys correctly first.
    • Implement support for "vmmc-supply" in sdhc(4), needed to power on the WiFi chip on the Raspberry Pi 5.
    • Add RK3528 support to rkpinctrl(4).
    • Add RK3528 support to rkclock(4).
    • Add RK3528 support to rkusbphy(4).
    • Fix and add time sensor to pvclock(4).
  • New or improved network hardware support:
    • Make the cad(4) Ethernet interface on the Raspberry Pi 5 work by configuring the delays for RGMII PHYs correctly.
    • Add support for the Realtek RTL8125D and RTL8127 chips to the rge(4) driver and update microcode for RTL8125B.
    • Add a software implementation of TCP Large Receive Offload to ixl(4).
    • Intel E810 network devices ice(4) are supported for 100 and 25 GBit in QSFP and SFP variants.
    • Add support for the ifconfig transceiver command to ice(4).
    • Add Rx checksum offload and TSO (TCP Segmentation Offload) support to ice(4).
    • Enable RSS in ice(4), and enable Tx/Rx across multiple queues.
    • Use SoftLRO in ice(4), but default off.
    • Add SoftLRO support to bnxt(4).
    • Add support for TSO to iavf(4).
    • Disable hvn(4) TCP checksum offload, broken on newer hyper-v versions.
  • Added or improved wireless network drivers:
    • Add 802.11n/HT and roaming support to qwx(4).
    • Fix TKIP crypto offload in qwx(4).
    • Fix suspend/resume instability caused by qwx(4).
    • Make WPA handshakes succeed more reliably with the bwfm(4) driver.
    • Unbreak support for a subset of Intel AX210 devices by making iwx(4) load the correct firmware image for them.
  • Installer, upgrade, bootloader, and pkg-tools improvements:
    • Add installer preference for disks bigger than 1G as default root disk.
    • Stop offering http/nfs for offline installation.
    • Prevent installing a corrupted /bsd on relink errors.
    • Prevent pkg_add(1) update from advising file removal appropriate only when deleting packages.
  • Security improvements:
    • Permit setsockopt/getsockopt IPPROTO_IP/IP_TOS and IPPROTO_IPV6/IPV6_TCLASS in pledge "stdio". Previously these were restricted to "inet". However, setting TOS is low risk and this way a lot more attack surface from inet can be removed.
    • Allow low-risk getsockname() and getpeername() in stdio.
    • Pledge fc-cache(1) and mkfontscale(1) and change ownership of the fontconfig cache to the _fc-cache user to run unprivileged when installing fonts.
    • Add IPV6_RECVTCLASS to the authorized setsockopt operations for IPPROTO_IPV6 in pledge, fixing recent chromium browser with IPv6.
    • Add an MI mechanism for creating an (unmapped) guard page between the PCB and the kernel stack and enable on 64-bit architectures with 4k pages.
  • New features in the network stack:
    • Stop adding interfaces with blackhole and reject routes to the egress group, even if a default route points at them.
    • Some network drivers allow to use soft LRO for TCP. If the hardware does not support to concatenate received TCP packets, this can be done at driver level. As the upper layers handle less packets, performance improves. Currently the feature is disabled by default, activate with ifconfig(8) tcplro. Software LRO has been implemented for bnxt(4), ice(4), ixl(4).
    • New erspan(4) driver for ERSPAN Type II tunnel networks.
  • Further changes and bugfixes in the network stack:
    • For divert(4) protocols sysctl(8) knobs have been consolidated.
    • ARP and ND6 list use iterators to be MP safe. This also avoids a race when timeouts handled multipath link layer entries.
    • TCP keepalive intervals have been fixed.
    • Do not allow negative values for sysctl(2) net.inet6.ip6.neighborgcthresh, which would disable the limit ND6 entries, and disallow setting negative values for net.inet6.ip6.maxdynroutes, which previously allowed unlimited redirect routes.
    • Fix error handling in IPv6 multicast sysctl.
    • Fix refcnt leak in veb(4).
    • Use VLAN hardware tagging in veb(4).
    • Use VLAN hardware tagging in bridge(4).
    • Use checksum offload in veb(4) and bridge(4).
    • Unbreak vport.4 to vport communication on the same veb(4).
    • Remove net.inet6.ip6.soiikey sysctl.
    • Make lo(4).4 attach multiple interface queues, allowing local network connections to use multiple softnets.
    • Allow packets being sent out pppoe(4) interfaces to bypass queues and go straight onto the underlying interface.
  • The following changes were made to the pf(4) firewall:
    • The check whether a TCP RST packet belongs to a connection was too strict. Now resetting a TCP state also works if there were gaps in the sequence number space due to lost packets.
    • Repair "least-states" in pf(4) by decrementing the state counter properly when the state is removed.
  • Routing daemons and other userland network programs saw the following improvements:
    • Make getaddrinfo(3) convert numeric host addresses for all address families, independent of them being listed in /etc/resolv.conf.
    • Added lldpd(8), Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) daemon, and lldp(8) control program.
    • Added bpflogd(8), Berkeley Packet Filter logging daemon.
    • Disallow nc(1) -T with = when arguments are not key=value pairs.
    • Add SOCKS4A support to nc(1) proxy (-X) mode.
    • Add ALPN TLS option, so you can specify -T alpn=value in nc(1).
    • Make iked(8) load multiple certificates as a certificate chain from a file.
    • In relayd(8) add tighter checks on inter-process messages.
    • Remove the currently useless "status memory" command in unwindctl(8).
    • Disable aggressive-nsec when "force" is in use in unwind.
    • Repair the printing of IPv6 route commands with netstart(8) -n, which was broken in 2022.
    • Change dhcpd(8) to use the rdomain/rtable it was started in.
    • Reduce the number of times that dhcpleased(8) uses if_indextoname(3) to translate an interface index to an interface name.
    • In dhcp6leased(8) Install reject route for prefix delegation, to prevent routing loops in case only parts of the delegated prefix are configured on interfaces.
    • Introduce a lower bound for the IPv6-Only preferred timelimit in dhcpleased(8).
    • Network statistics reporting using netstat(1) was changed:
      • The output of netstat(1) for multicast route and divert protocol statistics have been improved.
      • Export TCP send congestion window for IPv6 also to allow its display with netstat(1) -B.
      • Harmonize netstat(1) ip4 and ip6 multicast counter output.
      • Provide m_pool_alloc() failures in mbstat, making the count visible in netstat(1) -m.
      • Remove specific divert6 netstat counters, use divert instead.
    • acme-client(1) saw several changes:
      • Made acme-client(1) handle "processing" status by retrying.
      • Remove http support from acme-client(1), using https for the API server per RFC 8555.
      • Allow port numbers in API URLs, letting acme-client(1) talk to Let's Encrypt's pebble server.
      • Implement draft-ietf-acme-profiles for acme-client(1).
      • Adapt renewal calculation for shortlived certificates in acme-client(1).
    • In bgpd(8):
      • In verbose mode log the NOTIFICATION data for UPDATE errors.
      • Fix a busy loop error in the pfkey handling.
      • Introduce monotime - an internal time API using microsecond resolution.
      • Fix accounting of the pending update counter
      • Use new ibufq interface instead of handrolling the same.
      • Large refactoring of internal APIs to make the code easier to share and cleaner.
    • In rpki-client(8):
      • The parser process now uses parallel threads for object validation. The new -p option can be used to adjust the number of threads.
      • Support for Canonical Cache Representation has been added. CCR is a new DER-encoded data interchange format to support audit trail keeping, validated payload dissemination, and analytics pipelines. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-spaghetti-sidrops-rpki-ccr
      • Certificate parsing and validation has been completely reworked. In particular, a more stringent set of compliance checks based on RFC 6487, RFC 8209, and RFC 8608 is imposed on end entity certificates.
      • Filemode is now able to detect most file types without recourse to the file name extension.
      • Experimental support for P-256 Trust Anchor keys was added.
      • Marshalling and unmarshalling of privsep messages was improved.
      • In verbose mode, warnings are emitted about uncompressed HTTP/RRDP transfers larger than one megabyte. Publication server operators are strongly encouraged to offer gzip compressed HTTP content-encoding, see draft-ietf-sidrops-publication-server-bcp, section 6.3.
      • Emit all key identifiers (AKI and SKI) encoded in JSON as bare hex strings without colons.
      • Fixed numerous minor issues flagged by the Coverity static analyzer.
  • tmux(1) improvements and bug fixes:
    • Allow tmux(1) bind -r and -N to change an existing key binding if no command is specified.
    • Add more features for boolean expressions in tmux(1) formats.
    • Add an option variation-selector-always-wide to instruct tmux(1) not to always interpret VS16 as a wide character and assume the terminal does likewise.
    • Add R format modifier to tmux(1) to repeat an argument.
    • Add -E to run-shell to forward stderr as well as stdout in tmux(1).
    • Fix several memory leaks.
    • Flush scrolling when wrapping so UTF-8 in last position draws correctly.
    • Treat Shift-Tab just like the up arrow in completion popup menu.
    • Fix PageDown in menus.
    • Replace invalid UTF-8 with the placeholder instead of ignoring them.
    • Add pane-border-lines value to use spaces for pane borders.
    • Add a nicer default second and third status line.
    • Add a tmux(1) set-default style attribute which replaces the current default colours and attributes completely.
    • Add S: to list tmux(1) sessions with modifiers for sorting.
    • Add tmux(1) support for DECRQSS SP q (report cursor style), DECRQM ?12 (report cursor blink state) and DECRQM ?2004, ?1004, ?1006 (report mouse state).
    • Introduce tmux(1) new window option: tiled-layout-max-columns, which configures the maximum number of columns in the tiled layout.
  • LibreSSL version 4.2.0:
    • Portable changes:
      • Added explicit OpenBSD/ISC license to build system / scripts.
      • Fixed compilation on more CPU targets by removing architecture-specific definitions from header files.
      • Fixed builds in deep paths by using relative paths for linking.
      • Fixed Windows builds with Clang and CMake.
      • Fixed Windows error handling accepting connections with nc.
    • Internal improvements:
      • Cleaned up code implementing block cipher modes of operation. Includes untangling a horrible #ifdef mess and removing a few instances of undefined behavior.
      • Removed assembly implementations of AES using bit slicing (BS-AES) and vector permutation (VP-AES).
      • Removed OPENSSL_SMALL_FOOTPRINT and OPENSSL_FIPSAPI.
      • Implemented constant time EC field element operations to allow elliptic curve operations without bignum arithmetic.
      • Implemented an EC method using homogeneous projective coordinates. This will allow exception-free elliptic curve arithmetic in constant time in future releases.
      • Started cleaning up the openssl speed implementation.
      • The last SIGILL-based CPU capability detection was removed. Instead, capabilities are now detected using a constructor on library load, which improves the incomplete coverage by calls to OPENSSL_init_crypto() on various entry points.
      • Rework and simplify AES handling in EVP. In particular, AES-NI is now handled in the AES internal code and no longer requires the use of EVP.
      • Added a public API for ML-KEM. This is not yet documented in a manpage and may not be in its final form. This will be used to support X25519MLKEM768 in libssl.
    • Compatibility changes:
      • Removed the -msie_hack option from the openssl(1) ca subcommand.
      • Removed parameters of the 239-bit prime curves from X9.62, H.5.2: prime239v1, prime239v2, prime239v3.
      • Increased default MAC salt length used by PKCS12_set_mac(3) to 16 per recommendation of NIST SP 800-132.
      • Encrypted PKCS#8 key files now use a default password-based key derivation function that is acceptable in the present millennium.
      • const corrected EVP_PKEY_get{0,1}_{DH,DSA,EC_KEY,RSA}().
      • X509_CRL_verify() now checks that the AlgorithmIdentifiers in the signature and the tbsCertList are identical.
      • Of the old *err() only PEMerr(), RSAerr(), and SSLerr() remain.
      • Removed BIO_s_log(), X509_PKEY_{new,free}(), PEM_X509_INFO_read() and PEM_X509_INFO_write_bio().
      • Re-expose the ASN.1 Boolean template items.
      • opensslconf.h is now machine-independent.
    • New features:
      • Allow specifying ALPN in nc(1) via -Talpn="http/1.1,http:/1.0".
    • Bug fixes:
      • Avoid pointer arithmetic on NULL for memory BIOs.
      • Fix leaks and use-after-frees in PKCS7 attribute handling.
      • Ensure p and q in RSA private key have a minimum distance of 2^(bits/2 - 100) as specified in NIST SP 800-56B Revision 2.
    • Security fixes:
      • Fix out-of-bounds read and write, memory leaks and incorrect error check for CMS enveloped data.
    • Documentation:
      • Rewrote most of the EC documentation from scratch to be at least somewhat accurate and intelligible.
      • Updated documentation for SMIME_{read,write}* to match reality.
    • Testing and proactive security:
      • Added a testing framework that will help deduplicating lots of ad-hoc code in the regression tests.
      • Converted the Wycheproof testing framework to use testvectors_v1. This in combination with a few new tests significantly increases regress coverage.
  • OpenSSH 10.2:
    • Security fixes:
      • ssh(1): disallow control characters in usernames passed via the commandline or expanded using %-sequences from the configuration file, and disallow \0 characters in ssh:// URIs.
        If an ssh(1) commandline was constructed using usernames or URIs obtained from an untrusted source, and if a ProxyCommand that uses the %r expansion was configured, then it may be possible for an attacker to inject shell expressions that may be executed when the proxy command is started.
        We strongly recommend against using untrusted inputs to construct ssh(1) commandlines.
        This change also relaxes the validity checks in one small way: usernames supplied via the configuration file as literals (i.e. that have no % expansion characters) are not subject to these validity checks. This allows usernames that contain arbitrary characters to be used, but only via configuration files. This is done on the basis that ssh's configuration is trusted.
        This issue was reported by David Leadbeater.
    • Potentially incompatible changes:
      • ssh(1): add a warning when the connection negotiates a non-post quantum safe key agreement algorithm.
        This warning has been added due to the risk of "store now, decrypt later" attacks. More details at the OpenSSH Post-Quantum Cryptography page.
        This warning may be controlled via a new WarnWeakCrypto ssh_config option, defaulting to on. This option is likely to control additional weak crypto warnings in the future.
      • ssh(1), sshd(8): major changes to handling of DSCP marking/IPQoS
        Both the client and the server have changed the default DSCP (a.k.a IPQoS) values and the way these values are selected at runtime.
        Both endpoints now use Expedited Forward (EF) for interactive traffic by default. This provides better prioritisation, especially on wireless media (cf. RFC 8325). Non-interactive traffic now uses the operating system default DSCP marking. Both the interactive and non-interactive DSCP values may be overridden via the IPQoS keyword in ssh_config(5) and sshd_config(5).
        The DSCP value selected may now change over the course of a connection. ssh(1) and sshd(8) will automatically select between the interactive and non-interactive IPQoS values depending on the type of SSH channels open. E.g. if an sftp session is using the connection, then the non-interactive value will be used.
        This is important now that the default interactive IPQoS is EF (Expedited Forwarding), as many networks are configured to allow only relatively small amounts of traffic of this class and they will aggressively deprioritise the entire connection if this is exceeded.
      • ssh(1), sshd(8): deprecate support for IPv4 type-of-service (TOS) keywords in the IPQoS configuration directive.
        Type of Service (ToS) was deprecated in the late nineties and replaced with the Differentiated Services architecture. Diffserv has significant advantages for operators because this mechanism offers more granularity.
        OpenSSH switched its default IPQoS from ToS to DSCP values in 2018.
        IPQoS configurations with 'lowdelay', 'reliability', or 'throughput' will be ignored and instead the system default QoS settings apply. Additionally, a debug message is logged about the deprecation with a suggestion to use DSCP.
      • ssh-add(1): when adding certificates to an agent, set the expiry to the certificate expiry time plus a short (5 min) grace period.
        This will cause the agent to automatically remove certificates shortly after they expire. A new ssh-add -N option disables this behaviour.
      • All: remove experimental support for XMSS keys. This was never enabled by default. We expect to implement a new post-quantum signature scheme in the near future.
      • ssh-agent(1), sshd(8): move agent listener sockets from /tmp to under ~/.ssh/agent for both ssh-agent(1) and forwarded sockets in sshd(8).
        This ensures processes that have restricted filesystem access that includes /tmp do not ambiently have the ability to use keys in an agent.
        Moving the default directory has the consequence that the OS will no longer clean up stale agent sockets, so ssh-agent now gains this ability.
        To support $HOME on NFS, the socket path includes a truncated hash of the hostname. ssh-agent will by default only clean up sockets from the same hostname.
        ssh-agent(1) gains some new flags: -U suppresses the automatic cleanup of stale sockets when it starts. -u forces a cleanup without keeping a running agent, -uu forces a cleanup that ignores the hostname. -T makes ssh-agent put the socket back in /tmp.
    • New features:
      • ssh(1), sshd(8): add SIGINFO handlers to log active channel and session information.
      • sshd(8): when refusing a certificate for user authentication, log enough information to identify the certificate in addition to the reason why it was being denied. Makes debugging certificate authorisation problems a bit easier.
      • ssh(1), ssh-agent(1): support ed25519 keys hosted on PKCS#11 tokens.
      • ssh(1): add a ssh_config(5) RefuseConnection option that, when encountered while processing an active section in a configuration terminates ssh(1) with an error message that contains the argument to the option.
        This may be useful for expressing reminders or warnings in config files, for example: Match host foo RefuseConnection "foo is deprecated, use splork instead"
      • sshd(8): make the X11 display number check relative to X11DisplayOffset. This will allows people to use X11DisplayOffset to configure much higher port ranges if they really want, while not changing the default behaviour.
      • unit tests: the unit test framework now includes some basic benchmarking capabilities. Run with "make UNITTEST_BENCHMARK=yes".
    • Bugfixes:
      • sshd(8): fix mistracking of MaxStartups process exits in some situations. At worst, this could cause all MaxStartups slots to fill and sshd to refuse new connections.
      • ssh(1): fix delay on X client startup when ObscureKeystrokeTiming is enabled.
      • sshd(8): increase the maximum size of the supported configuration from 256KB to 4MB, which ought to be enough for anybody. Fail early and visibly when this limit is breached.
      • sftp(1): during sftp uploads, avoid a condition where a failed write could be ignored if a subsequent write succeeded. This is unlikely but technically possible because sftp servers are allowed to reorder requests.
      • sshd(8): avoid a race condition when the sshd-auth process exits that could cause a spurious error message to be logged.
      • sshd(8): log at level INFO when PerSourcePenalties actually blocks access to a source address range. Previously this was logged at level VERBOSE, which hid enforcement actions under default config settings.
      • sshd(8): GssStrictAcceptor was missing from sshd -T output; fix
      • sshd(8): Make the MaxStartups and PerSourceNetBlockSize options first-match-wins as advertised.
      • ssh(1): fix an incorrect return value check in the local forward cancellation path that would cause failed cancellations not to be logged.
      • sshd(8): make "Match !final" not trigger a 2nd pass ssh_config parsing pass (unless hostname canonicalisation or a separate "Match final" does).
      • ssh(1): better debug diagnostics when loading keys. Will now list key fingerprint and algorithm (not just algorithm number) as well as making it explicit which keys didn't load.
      • All: fix a number of memory leaks found by LeakSanitizer, Coverity and manual inspection.
      • sshd(8): : Output the current name for PermitRootLogin's "prohibit-password" in sshd -T instead of its deprecated alias "without-password".
      • ssh(1): make writing known_hosts lines more atomic by writing the entire line in one operation and using unbuffered stdio.
        Usually writes to this file are serialised on the "Are you sure you want to continue connecting?" prompt, but if host key checking is disabled and connections were being made with high concurrency then interleaved writes might have been possible.
  • Ports and packages:

    Many pre-built packages for each architecture:

    • aarch64: 12506
    • amd64: 12651
    • arm: xxx
    • i386: 10457
    • mips64: 8484
    • powerpc: xxx
    • powerpc64: 9698
    • riscv64: xxx
    • sparc64: 9088

    Some highlights:

    • Asterisk 16.30.1, 18.26.4, 20.15.2 and 22.5.2
    • Audacity 3.7.5
    • CMake 3.31.8
    • Chromium 141.0.7390.54
    • Emacs 30.2
    • FFmpeg 6.1.3
    • GCC 8.4.0 and 11.2.0
    • GHC 9.8.3
    • GNOME 48
    • Go 1.25.1
    • JDK 8u462, 11.0.28, 17.0.16, 21.0.8 and 25.0.0
    • KDE Applications 25.08.1
    • KDE Frameworks 6.18.0
    • KDE Plasma 6.4.5
    • Krita 5.2.13
    • LLVM/Clang 19.1.7, 20.1.8 and 21.1.2
    • LibreOffice 25.8.1.1
    • Lua 5.1.5, 5.2.4, 5.3.6 and 5.4.7
    • MariaDB 11.4.7
    • Mono 6.12.0.199
    • Mozilla Firefox 143.0.3 and ESR 140.3.1
    • Mozilla Thunderbird 143.3.1
    • Mutt 2.2.15 and NeoMutt 20250905
    • Node.js 22.20.0
    • OCaml 4.14.2
    • OpenLDAP 2.6.10
    • PHP 8.2.29, 8.3.26 and 8.4.13
    • Postfix 3.5.25 and 3.10.1
    • PostgreSQL 17.6
    • Python 2.7.18 and 3.12.11
    • Qt 5.15.16 (+ kde patches) and 6.8.3
    • R 4.5.1
    • Ruby 3.2.9, 3.3.9 and 3.4.6
    • Rust 1.90.0
    • SQLite 3.50.4
    • Shotcut 25.08.16
    • Sudo 1.9.17p2
    • Suricata 7.0.7
    • Tcl/Tk 8.5.19 and 8.6.16
    • TeX Live 2025
    • Vim 9.1.1706 and Neovim 0.11.4
    • Xfce 4.20.0
  • As usual, steady improvements in manual pages and other documentation.
  • The system includes the following major components from outside suppliers:
    • Xenocara (based on X.Org 7.7 with xserver 21.1.18 + patches, freetype 2.13.3, fontconfig 2.15.0, Mesa 25.0.7, xterm 399, xkeyboard-config 2.20, fonttosfnt 1.2.4 and more)
    • LLVM/Clang 19.1.7 (+ patches)
    • GCC 4.2.1 (+ patches) and 3.3.6 (+ patches)
    • Perl 5.40.1 (+ patches)
    • pkgconf 2.4.3
    • NSD 4.13.0
    • Unbound 1.24.0
    • Ncurses 6.4
    • Binutils 2.17 (+ patches)
    • GDB 6.3 (+ patches)
    • Awk 20250116
    • Expat 2.7.3
    • zlib 1.3.1 (+ patches)

How to install

Please refer to the following files on the mirror site for extensive details on how to install OpenBSD 7.8 on your machine:

Quick installer information for people familiar with OpenBSD, and the use of the "disklabel -E" command. If you are at all confused when installing OpenBSD, read the relevant INSTALL.* file as listed above!

OpenBSD/alpha:

If your machine can boot from CD, you can write install78.iso or cd78.iso to a CD and boot from it. Refer to INSTALL.alpha for more details.

OpenBSD/amd64:

If your machine can boot from CD, you can write install78.iso or cd78.iso to a CD and boot from it. You may need to adjust your BIOS options first.

If your machine can boot from USB, you can write install78.img or miniroot78.img to a USB stick and boot from it.

If you can't boot from a CD, floppy disk, or USB, you can install across the network using PXE as described in the included INSTALL.amd64 document.

If you are planning to dual boot OpenBSD with another OS, you will need to read INSTALL.amd64.

OpenBSD/arm64:

Depending on your hardware, you can write install78.iso or cd78.iso to a CD and boot from it, or write a system specific miniroot to an SD card and boot from it after connecting to the serial console. Refer to INSTALL.armv64 for more details.

OpenBSD/armv7:

Write a system specific miniroot to an SD card and boot from it after connecting to the serial console. Refer to INSTALL.armv7 for more details.

OpenBSD/hppa:

Boot over the network by following the instructions in INSTALL.hppa or the hppa platform page.

OpenBSD/i386:

If your machine can boot from CD, you can write install78.iso or cd78.iso to a CD and boot from it. You may need to adjust your BIOS options first.

If your machine can boot from USB, you can write install78.img or miniroot78.img to a USB stick and boot from it.

If you can't boot from a CD, floppy disk, or USB, you can install across the network using PXE as described in the included INSTALL.i386 document.

If you are planning on dual booting OpenBSD with another OS, you will need to read INSTALL.i386.

OpenBSD/landisk:

Write miniroot78.img to the start of the CF or disk, and boot normally.

OpenBSD/loongson:

Write miniroot78.img to a USB stick and boot bsd.rd from it or boot bsd.rd via tftp. Refer to the instructions in INSTALL.loongson for more details.

OpenBSD/luna88k:

Copy 'boot' and 'bsd.rd' to a Mach or UniOS partition, and boot the bootloader from the PROM, and then bsd.rd from the bootloader. Refer to the instructions in INSTALL.luna88k for more details.

OpenBSD/macppc:

Burn the install78.iso image from a mirror site to a CDROM, and power on your machine while holding down the C key until the display turns on and shows OpenBSD/macppc boot.

Alternatively, at the Open Firmware prompt, enter boot cd:,ofwboot /7.8/macppc/bsd.rd

OpenBSD/octeon:

After connecting a serial port, boot bsd.rd over the network via DHCP/tftp. Refer to the instructions in INSTALL.octeon for more details.

OpenBSD/powerpc64:

To install, write install78.img or miniroot78.img to a USB stick, plug it into the machine and choose the OpenBSD install menu item in Petitboot. Refer to the instructions in INSTALL.powerpc64 for more details.

OpenBSD/riscv64:

To install, write install78.img or miniroot78.img to a USB stick, and boot with that drive plugged in. Make sure you also have the microSD card plugged in that shipped with the HiFive Unmatched board. Refer to the instructions in INSTALL.riscv64 for more details.

OpenBSD/sparc64:

Burn the image from a mirror site to a CDROM, boot from it, and type boot cdrom.

If this doesn't work, or if you don't have a CDROM drive, you can write floppy78.img or floppyB78.img (depending on your machine) to a floppy and boot it with boot floppy. Refer to INSTALL.sparc64 for details.

Make sure you use a properly formatted floppy with NO BAD BLOCKS or your install will most likely fail.

You can also write miniroot78.img to the swap partition on the disk and boot with boot disk:b.

If nothing works, you can boot over the network as described in INSTALL.sparc64.

How to upgrade

If you already have an OpenBSD 7.7 system, and do not want to reinstall, upgrade instructions and advice can be found in the Upgrade Guide.

Notes about the source code

src.tar.gz contains a source archive starting at /usr/src. This file contains everything you need except for the kernel sources, which are in a separate archive. To extract:

# mkdir -p /usr/src # cd /usr/src # tar xvfz /tmp/src.tar.gz

sys.tar.gz contains a source archive starting at /usr/src/sys. This file contains all the kernel sources you need to rebuild kernels. To extract:

# mkdir -p /usr/src/sys # cd /usr/src # tar xvfz /tmp/sys.tar.gz

Both of these trees are a regular CVS checkout. Using these trees it is possible to get a head-start on using the anoncvs servers as described here. Using these files results in a much faster initial CVS update than you could expect from a fresh checkout of the full OpenBSD source tree.

Ports Tree

A ports tree archive is also provided. To extract:

# cd /usr # tar xvfz /tmp/ports.tar.gz

Go read the ports page if you know nothing about ports at this point. This text is not a manual of how to use ports. Rather, it is a set of notes meant to kickstart the user on the OpenBSD ports system.

The ports/ directory represents a CVS checkout of our ports. As with our complete source tree, our ports tree is available via AnonCVS. So, in order to keep up to date with the -stable branch, you must make the ports/ tree available on a read-write medium and update the tree with a command like:

# cd /usr/ports # cvs -d [email protected]:/cvs update -Pd -rOPENBSD_7_8

[Of course, you must replace the server name here with a nearby anoncvs server.]

Note that most ports are available as packages on our mirrors. Updated ports for the 7.8 release will be made available if problems arise.

If you're interested in seeing a port added, would like to help out, or just would like to know more, the mailing list [email protected] is a good place to know.

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