Hoewel hij pas voor 1 mei op de planning stond, is dinsdag de nieuwe halfjaarlijkse release van OpenBSD uitgekomen. Op deze pagina is een uitgebreide lijst van ftp- en http-downloadlocaties te vinden. OpenBSD stamt af van de originele Berkeley Software Distribution en heeft als kenmerk dat de ontwikkelaars alleen opensourcesoftware willen gebruiken. Verder staat het besturingssysteem bekend om zijn uitstekende documentatie en veiligheid. Uitgebreide releasenotes kunnen op deze pagina worden gevonden; hieronder is een overzicht te vinden van de belangrijkste verbeteringen:
OpenBSD 5.9 released (early!)
The release of OpenBSD 5.9, previously scheduled for the usual May 1st, has just been officially announced! The release page mentions most of the major improvements, and the detailed changelog has a much longer list. Here are some of the bigger things incorporated into 5.9 that we're excited about:As always, OpenSSH, OpenSMTPD, LibreSSL and all the other sub-projects have got some nice updates of their own. Hit up the release page for more info, and consider picking up a CD set or making a donation to support the project. Be sure to check out the errata page and apply any relevant patches. Happy upgrades!
- Pledge
With a great Hackfest presentation to lay out all the details, pledge(2) is one of the more prominent changes. We say prominent, but you actually shouldn't notice any difference with it enabled... assuming all your applications behave correctly. Much work has been done in this area, with around 70% of the OpenBSD userland being modified to use pledge within a single release cycle! A few ports also got the same treatment - something to expect more of as time goes on.- UEFI
Many new laptops come with UEFI now, some without an option to fall back to a traditional BIOS. With the 5.9 release, OpenBSD can now be booted on such machines.- GPT
Assuming you're on the amd64 platform, support for GPT has been vastly improved throughout the OS. The installer has been updated to accommodate as well, and it even works on softraid(4) volumes.- Rewritten less
The less(1) we're all familiar with has been completely rewritten. After importing a fork from illumos' Garrett D'Amore, OpenBSD continued to make improvements to the code. A safer and more modern tool was the end result, even if it's just for viewing text. Hopefully there will be less bugs now.- Xen domU
If running OpenBSD under Xen (such as on Amazon's cloud platform) sounds interesting to you, you'll be happy to know that 5.9 includes some pretty solid support for this.- Graphics
Laptop users rejoice, as 5.9 includes graphics support for Intel's Broadwell and Bay Trail GPUs!- Network SMP
Many improvements have been made to get the network stack running multithreaded. There's still plenty more to do in this area, but some exciting progress has definitely been made already.- 802.11n
Another big one for laptop users: initial support for N wireless has landed in both the iwm(4) and iwn(4) drivers.- UTF-8
Locale support for everything but C and UTF-8 has been torn out, and many utilities in the base system have much better UTF-8 support than prevously.
