OpenBSD Journal

Courtney Allen has published a blog post about how to run a website and blog almost exclusively on things that are in the OpenBSD base system already, only adding AsciiDoc to the mix.

The lead in reads, I have fallen in love with a recent combination of software to make good looking websites, and having an easy to manage web server. I’m a minimalist in many ways. Really, I find that it makes my life easier.

You can read the whole thing here: 0 Dependency Websites with OpenBSD & AsciiDoc.

Christian Ludwig "wrote a tool to statically analyze spl(9) kernel locking in OpenBSD. It even found some bugs."

His write up is here: https://medium.com/@chrissicool/analyze-openbsds-kernel-with-domain-specific-knowledge-ca665d92eebb

His code for the Lock Balancing Checker referenced in the write up is available under an ISC license and can be obtained here: https://github.com/chrissicool/lbc

Here are a few recent OpenBSD news items that we almost missed ourselves:

• The r2k22 hackathon is underway in Bruges, Belgium, see https://bsd.network/@stsp/108531205545193224
• The new grep --null option
• Adventures with privsep in xlock(1)

Frederic Cambus (fcambus@) has written a blog entry regarding the significant differences between the versions of LLVM in base and ports.

We wouldn't blame you if you it slipped under your RADAR that OpenBGPD 7.4 was released, since it doesn't appear to have been mentioned on the OpenBGPD website yet. However, the release notes may be found in this mailing list post from June 14th, 2022:
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=165521316007652&w=2

Peter Hansteen, Massimiliano Stucchi and Tom Smyth gave a presentation on pf at BSDCan 2022. While a video recording from the event has yet to appear, the slides from their presentation may be viewed here:
https://home.nuug.no/~peter/pftutorial/

If you want to attend a session like this, the next chance is at EuroBSDCon in Vienna, September 15.

OpenIKED 7.1 was released on May 23rd, 2022.

The complete release notes may be read here:
https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/OpenIKED/openiked-7.1-relnotes.txt

LibreSSL 3.5.3 was released on May 18th, 2022.

The release notes may be found here:
https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/LibreSSL/libressl-3.5.3-relnotes.txt

However, given the release notes are rather brief, they are quoted here in their entirety:

We have released LibreSSL 3.5.3, which will be arriving in the LibreSSL directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon. It includes the following reliability fix: * Fix d2i_ASN1_OBJECT(). A confusion of two CBS resulted in advancing the passed *der_in pointer incorrectly. Thanks to Aram Sargsyan for reporting the issue and testing the fix. The LibreSSL project continues improvement of the codebase to reflect modern, safe programming practices. We welcome feedback and improvements from the broader community. Thanks to all of the contributors who helped make this release possible.

Crystal Kolipe writes in about her work on the framebuffer console, and provides an article on

… how to add a 'night mode' to the OpenBSD framebuffer console to give the text a yellow tint for more comfortable night time viewing, along with quite a few other cosmetic tweaks such as adding support for strikethrough text and double underlining. The article explains how to dynamically adjust the colour pallette, add a new sysctl value, and add a new escape sequence to the console emulation code in the kernel.

Read more…

Following much development and testing, parallel IP forwarding has been enabled in -current. The most recent of the relevant commits are: CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: bluhm@cvs.openbsd.org 2022/04/30 15:13:57 Modified files: sys/net : if.c ifq.c Log message: Run IP input and forwarding with shared netlock. Also distribute packets from the interface receive rings into multiple net task queues. Note that we still have only one softnet task. So there will be no concurrency yet, but we can notice wrong exclusive lock assertions. Soon the final step will be to increase the NET_TASKQ define. lots of testing Hrvoje Popovski; OK sashan@ and:

Read more…

In -current, the performance of pkg_add(1) has been greatly enhanced by the enabling of caching by default:

CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: espie@cvs.openbsd.org 2022/04/29 04:44:05 Modified files: usr.sbin/pkg_add/OpenBSD: PackageLocation.pm usr.sbin/pkg_add/OpenBSD/PackageRepository: Cache.pm Installed.pm Log message: finally, turn on caching by default change the defines: TEST_CACHING -> !NO_CACHING TEST_CACHING_VERBOSE -> CACHING_VERBOSE TEST_CACHING_RECHECK -> CACHING_RECHECK okay with sthen@

syspatch71-001_wifi was somewhat broken (in terms of the housekeeping rather than the functionality of the patch).

On those systems to which the faulty patch was applied, some manual intervention is required. Instructions for this are now on the errata page.

Hot on the heels of OpenBSD 7.1's release, LibreSSL has been updated to 3.5.2!

The complete release notes may be read here: https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/LibreSSL/libressl-3.5.2-relnotes.txt

The long spring (or fall) wait is over, the OpenBSD project today formally released OpenBSD 7.1, the 52nd release of our favorite open source operating system.

As usual, the release page lists the main highlights of the new release, which include

• OpenBSD/arm64 contains greatly improved support for Apple M1 systems [See earlier article].
• loongson platform retired.
• Many improvements to wireless networking. iwm(4) and iwx(4) have gained 80MHz channel support [See earlier article]. mtw(4), a driver for MediaTek MT7601U Wi-Fi devices, was added [See earlier article].
• Utility realpath(1) has been added.
• httpd(8) gained support for customised error pages and pre-compressed gzip files.
• Sysctl hw.perfpolicy is now set to auto by default at startup.
• igc(4), a driver for Intel 2.5Gb Ethernet controllers, has been added.
• Mouse tracking is now disabled by default in xterm(1). Setting X resource allowMouseOps to true reinstates the earlier behaviour.
• OpenSSH has been updated to version 9.0 [See earlier article].
  • This includes support for ssh-agent restriction [See earlier article].
  • Post-quantum KEX algorithm sntrup761x25519-sha512@openssh.com is now the default.
  • sftp(1) client has gained a "cp" command that supports server-side copying of files (using the new "copy-data" protocol extension).
• The login class capability database now supports /etc/login.conf.d/${class}, and this is used by the ports system.
• Base now includes (optional) support for minimal runtime detection of undefined behaviour. As described in clang-local(1), this requires use of clang(1)'s -fsanitize-minimal-runtime flag.

The new release supports 13 distinct hardware platforms with thousands of prebuilt packages for all platforms.

If you want to delve further into the details before (or while, after) installing or upgrading to the new release, the detailed changelog has all the details. Those upgrading from the 7.0 release (or earlier) should consult the Upgrade Guide.

If you enjoy this release, please remember to donate to the project as a way of saying thanks to the developers for their work.

Claudio Jeker (claudio@) has just announced the release of OpenBGPD 7.3. He writes:

We have released OpenBGPD 7.3, which will be arriving in the OpenBGPD directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon. This release includes the following changes to the previous release: * Macro expansion in the config file is improved. It is now possible to expand 'set large-community $myAS:$location:$transit'. * Add initial FIB support for Linux. Routes can be added and removed. Nexthop tracking and dynamic interface detection are not yet implemented. * Major refactoring in the RIB codebase to add multipath support in an upcoming release. OpenBGPD-portable is known to compile and run on FreeBSD, and the Linux distributions Alpine, Debian, Fedora, RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu. It is our hope that packagers take interest and help adapt OpenBGPD-portable to more distributions. We welcome feedback and improvements from the broader community. Thanks to all of the contributors who helped make this release possible.

Version 9.0 of OpenSSH has been released. Notable changes include:

• scp(1) uses the SFTP protocol by default.
• ssh(1)/sshd(8) use the "sntrup761x25519-sha512@openssh.com" post-quantum key exchange (KEX) algorithm by default.
• ssh-agent restriction [See earlier article] is supported.
• The sftp(1) client has gained a "copy"/"cp" command that supports server-side copying of files (using the new "copy-data" protocol extension).

OpenBSD 7.1 will include the new release.

In a message to tech@ (and arm64@), Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) wrote:

It has taken a while, but I'm pleased to announce that OpenBSD/arm64 works well enough on Apple M1 systems for some wider testing. A major milestone was reached with the release of the Asahi Linux installer: https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/ This provides an easy way to add UEFI "firmware" to your Apple M1 machine which is required to boot OpenBSD/arm64. The basic steps are: […]

Read more…

Hrvoje Popovski writes in with some result from his performance tests, like he did a few years ago:

I've tested Alexander Bluhm's (bluhm@) parallel ip forwarding diff and i've got some nice results. Readers should be aware that bluhm@'s diff sets NET_TASKQ=4 which means that forwarding will use 4 CPU threads and that this diff will affect only network cards that have multiqueue support (at the time of writing those cards are ix(4), ixl(4), and mcx(4). In my tests I was sending 14Mpps UDP packet over ix(4) interfaces which have 16 queues:

ix0 at pci10 dev 0 function 0 "Intel 82599" rev 0x01, msix, 16 queues ix1 at pci10 dev 0 function 1 "Intel 82599" rev 0x01, msix, 16 queues

OpenBSD box is Supermicro AS-1114S-WTRT with 24 x AMD EPYC 7413 24-Core Processor, 2650.37 MHz CPUs so this box is nice to test those 16 queues.

Read more…

For undeadly readers, our Errata column on the right side of the web site automatically updates and as of March 15th, 2022 some of you may have already noticed that there is a new security fix related to LibreSSL. Salient excerpt from the release notes as follows:

"* A malicious certificate can cause an infinite loop. Reported by and fix from Tavis Ormandy and David Benjamin, Google."

Subsequently, LibreSSL 3.5.1 (the development branch for those tracking -current/7.1-beta), 3.4.3 (the stable branch for those tracking 7.0-release) and 3.3.6 (the last supported branch for those stragglers still on OpenBSD 6.9) have been released!

Please see https://www.libressl.org/releases.html for more details and release notes specific to each version. It appears that the same bug was present in OpenSSL and has been fixed there too.

Following a request-for-testing thread on tech@, Stefan Sperling (stsp@) has committed some IEEE 802.11ac support to iwx(4):

CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: stsp@cvs.openbsd.org 2022/03/14 09:08:50 Modified files: sys/dev/pci : if_iwx.c if_iwxreg.h if_iwxvar.h Log message: Add initial support for 802.11ac (VHT) to the iwx(4) driver. This makes it possible to use 80MHz channels and VHT-specific MCS. Other 11ac features remain disabled for now. Tested: ax200: Matthias Schmidt, phessler, dv, kevlo, Joel Carnat, hrvoje, jmc, stsp ax201: mlarkin, stsp iwm (regression testing): stsp

As always, thanks Stefan!