OpenBSD 7.2 has been released. The major new features in this release are all concerned with expanding the operating system’s hardware support. This release adds supports for Apple’s M2, the Ampere Altra, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.
OpenBSD 7.2 has been released. The major new features in this release are all concerned with expanding the operating system’s hardware support. This release adds supports for Apple’s M2, the Ampere Altra, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.
The Ampere and Thinkpad X13s support is pretty exciting.
Ampere is a server/workstation chip with UEFI support, and the Thinkpad is an Arm laptop from a mainstream manufacturer. The chips being from Qualcomm doesn’t instill confidence about long term support, but Lenovo isn’t pine64 or Hardkernel.
Then is the tmux updates.
That’s pretty cool. Tmux could be shared if the perms on the socket were adjusted, and I’ll have to see if the ACLs make that easier.
Flatland_Spider,
Do you have one personally? Are drivers open source or is this infested with blobs like android? Find an ARM laptop that runs a mainstream kernel with no ifs ands or buts and I’m sold. 🙂 However experience with previous ARM devices has tempered my expectations for future ARM devices.
All drivers in OpenBSD are open source.
ThatChris,
The drivers in mainline linux are open source too, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll work on some given hardware.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/vh1xse/setup_linux_on_x13s_snapdragon_thinkpad_megathread/
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/vh1xse/setup_linux_on_x13s_snapdragon_thinkpad_megathread/
Here openbsd users are talking about this device and they’re saying some things work and others don’t: no acceleration, no wifi, broken suspect/resume.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/y8jwtf/openbsd_72_will_support_the_x13s/
The GPU, peripheral power states, and chipset control/monitoring are often sore spots for FOSS and the only officially supported drivers are binary. Hopefully these things can get sorted out for both linux and bsd.
That’s basically what I’d expect from a first release. OpenBSD is pretty serious about desktop usage, and I’d expect the person/people working on this will be making progress over the next few releases.
The GPU is the part I’m most concerned about.
OpenBSD has a good track record of ironing out the rest over time.
No, or not yet. 🙂
The Ampere stuff is well supported on the Linux side, as in boot off an aarch64 ISO image and install. I’ve been tracking it, and it’s one of the top candidates for a high wattage workstation.
The Thinkpad X13s is new on the Linux side too, and I’m not sure how blobby it is.
On the OpenBSD side, the X13s is probably using firmware blobs, but the OpenBSD team reverse engineers hardware if there isn’t a suitable BSD/MIT licensed FOSS driver available. The OpenBSD kernel doesn’t support loadable kernel modules, and the team likes the flexibility of changing kernel interfaces as needed. They’re pretty strict about that, so they wouldn’t be using binary drivers anyway.
Yeah, that would be nice. Lenovo having more resources then the other Arm laptop companies is a reason for hope.
Exactly, and why OpenBSD having support is much more exciting then Linux supporting it. Qualcomm is probably not involved in this.
pkg_add html2text
ftp -o – https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade72.html 2>/dev/null | html2text > upgrade72.txt
^
I like to have a local text copy of the page, especially to grab the files to remove.
They stopped doing release songs, apparently. I missed that memo. Always odd, but fit their profile as people who didn’t care how uncool they were. I’m just surprised they went as long as they did.
It’s mostly a matter of time and willingness. There was no one interested in composing a song this time.