OpenBSD 7.8 adds Raspberry Pi 5 support, parallel TCP stack on multiple CPUs & AMD SEV-ES

Theo de Raadt has announced the release of OpenBSD 7.8, furthering the operating system’s reputation for security and hardware support. The TCP stack now processes traffic in parallel on up to 8 CPU cores, which enhances networking performance for multicore systems. Alongside this, up to 8 softnet threads are used to handle network input, with the limit set by CPU count.

Turning to hardware support, ARM64 users gain support for the Raspberry Pi 5 via serial console, plus implementation of ACPICPU. AMD64 users benefit from improved GPIO event handling, including fixes for ThinkPad power buttons using AMD CPUs. On AMD processors, Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Encrypted State (SEV-ES) is now supported, enabling the launch of confidential virtual machines. The Direct Rendering Manager has been updated to Linux 6.12.50, supporting newer graphics cards.

Several improvements focus on reliability and performance for laptops and new architectures. Hibernate areas are now preallocated during boot, resolving allocation failures, and lid suspend/resume functions via GPIO are now implemented. ARM64 and RISC-V64 systems benefit from a mechanism avoiding excessive thread faults on single pages with duplicate memory mappings. Snapdragon X Elite machines now have working APM and CPU speed reporting. For Apple hardware, the DDB debugger can be entered when exuart detects a BREAK.

As always, OpenBSD 7.8 also includes various kernel improvements, better suspend/hibernate support, several SMP enhancements, updated DRM and graphics drivers, VMM/VMD improvements, various new userland features, enhanced hardware support and driver bug fixes, security fixes, and much more.