OpenBSD 8.0 beefs up virtual machines and gets a taste of Wine

OpenBSD 8.0 brings bigger virtual machines, graphics improvements, and another helping of AI mockery. The round version number doesn't signal a radical break with its predecessors.

OpenBSD 8.0 is the 61st release of the project. Developer Bryan Steele posted a highlights rundown on Mastodon. Wireless improvements include updates to the qwx driver for Qualcomm Wi-Fi 6 hardware. Its VMM/VMD hypervisor now supports multiprocessor VMs with up to 64 virtual CPUs in each guest.

The kernel virtual memory address space on x86-64 is now 512 GB, up from 4 GB, allowing for GPUs with large amounts of VRAM. On Arm64 machines, OpenBSD supports hibernation, and on both x86-64 and Arm64 it can use CPU AES instructions for faster encrypted swap.

Component upgrades include OpenSSH 10.6 and LibreSSL 4.4.0, and the DRM graphics driver stack from Linux 6.18. The default C compiler is Clang/LLVM 22, including for the SPARC64 edition – but at the cost of dropping support for the Loongson architecture.

The list of errata is short, with just four fixes – but then, version 8.0 is very new. Just days before this release, there was a high-profile OpenBSD issue: Calif's "Big Fish" research describes a decades-old shared-memory bug chained with a separate kernel flaw to gain local root access. Both were fixed in OpenBSD 7.9, through errata 026 and 018 respectively.

Project leader Theo de Raadt forked OpenBSD from NetBSD 1.0 in 1995, and the first release of the new OS was OpenBSD 1.2 in July 1996 – so version 8.0 is as close as the project will get to a 30th anniversary release. According to Calif's proof-of-concept code on GitHub, the bug was in the original code that both OpenBSD and NetBSD inherited from the original BSD codebase – which is how come there's a 37-year-old bug in a 30-year-old project. A HackerNews comment says: "Interestingly, looks like this was accidentally fixed in NetBSD during a rewrite of that code in August of 1999."

The project has not updated its infamous slogan. The homepage still proclaims: "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!"

As we noted in May when OpenBSD 7.9 appeared, the project rejects code generated by LLMs, although on the basis of licensing concerns rather than its cousin NetBSD's explicit anti-AI stance. As we reported recently, this strict anti-AI stance seems to be serving NetBSD well.

OpenBSD is also an anti-AI project, and for this release, the website goes out of its way to make that very clear. OpenBSD's mascot is a pufferfish, and in the banner artwork for the new release, "Puffy" has an extra eye – and the signpost in the image's background also has malformed text, a hallmark of early image-generation bots. The eyes are also constantly blinking – one at a time – to emphasize that this is a reference to Blinky the mutant fish from The Simpsons. In case you missed The Simpsons reference, the version 8.0 release theme song makes it even more explicit: it's titled "The Simps on AI." The lyrics and the vocals parody both Simpsons characters and AI users. Our favorite line sounds like Grampa Simpson, and says:

Back in my day we didn't have artificial intelligence, we had real stupidity – and we liked it.

We've seen negative reactions online, but then we often find that some people lack much of a sense of humor. For our part, we really enjoyed seeing the OpenBSD team having such fun. We reckon it will appeal to many Butlerian Jihadi types. It certainly did to The Reg FOSS desk.

A little Wine with your pufferfish

A couple of days before the 8.0 release came an unexpected announcement on the openbsd-ports mailing list: a proposed port of Wine for OpenBSD.

This is a new version of the Wine 11 runtime that allows Windows binaries to launch and run on OpenBSD. This is a 64-bit version of Wine for OpenBSD on x86-64, and for now, this means it can only run 64-bit Windows code.

(For the technical nitty-gritty: Wine needs to manipulate the CPU's GS register. Windows on x86-64 uses the GS segment base to locate the Thread Environment Block (TEB), as the late great Geoff Chappell explained. This is a very longstanding Windows data structure, going all the way back through Windows 95 to OS/2. The port was particularly tricky because OpenBSD doesn't allow programs to alter that, so the port is emulating instructions that use the %gs segment override. The snags are that this means 32-bit code doesn't work, and secondly, because this is unnecessary on Linux, the code is unlikely to be merged back into upstream Wine.)

If you want to see it working, there are a few screenshot galleries on Reddit's openbsd_gaming group, showing a number of recent major titles running: Some samples from WIP wine port, more wine-on-OpenBSD screenshots, and even more wine-on-OpenBSD proof.

The port comes hedged with caveats, notable among them that Wine does not do any kind of sandboxing, so using it potentially opens up OpenBSD to Windows malware. However, for some users, this could be a very useful addition.

OpenBSD is the simplest and cleanest member of the BSD family, indeed, of the FOSS Unix family. Part of this is because entire subsystems are missing that the other BSDs provide. Bluetooth connections to Apple's wireless keyboards and pointing devices aren't supported. There's no logical volume management – which would massively help with OpenBSD's complex disk partitioning. There's no journaling filesystem either (although a port of the new Gefs is in progress). While small and clean, its priorities favor security and simplicity, though performance will depend on the hardware and workload.

Importantly – since you probably will need to ask for help – the OpenBSD community does not have a reputation for friendliness.

Saying that, it is quite a lot easier to get OpenBSD installed and running, complete with its 25-year-old version 2.2.5 of the Fvwm window manager, than either NetBSD or FreeBSD. If you're looking for an AI-free, and indeed systemd-free, path away from Linux, OpenBSD 8.0 is very definitely worth a try. ®