OpenBSD 7.3 has been released. As usual, there’s no nice write-up of the major new features and changes – as befits OpenBSD as a project, I’m not complaining – and since I’m not too well-versed in the world of OpenBSD, I don’t really know which of the massive list of changes impact the average OpenBSD user the most.
The option for encryption in the installer is a game changer. This makes it so much easier to set up a fully encrypted system and makes all those — mostly incorrect or outdated — guides scattered all over the ‘net obsolete.
My only complaint so far is one that isn’t actually OpenBSD’s fault. I don’t care for the direction Xfce is going, and now that OpenBSD has adopted the new Xfce release, but doesn’t yet have a full Plasma KDE desktop, means I’m in limbo for a DE at the moment. On one of my underpowered Void systems I’ve found a nice compromise of using i3 as the WM with all KDE apps and it’s good, but not ideal, and not every KDE app is ported to OpenBSD yet.
The guide in OpenBSD’s FAQ is all that’s required (to an extent that “is” becomes “was”).
I agree, I was referring to the various guides out there which get boosted to top positions in search engines despite having bad or completely wrong information. An example, one of the most shared guides for setting up your user indicated you should increase “Staff” settings in login.conf (correct) then add your user to the Staff group (incorrect). The user should be added to the login class Staff to get the benefit of increased values in login.conf.
The same has been true of guides for encrypting your drive, many of which borrowed from the official guide then went off the rails. Yet, those are the ones that get shared the most instead of the actual instructions provided by the OpenBSD devs themselves. By including an automated option for encryption right in the installer, those erroneous guides are rendered moot and hopefully they will lose popularity over time.
> As usual, there’s no nice write-up of the major new features and changes
Psst. That part’s your job.
The OpenBSD journal has been a part of the community for ~20 years. Here’s their report, which includes link to previous reports on what’s new.
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20230410140049
There’s “What’s New” and a change log right there, so I’m not sure what the problem is.
I’ve upgraded an OpenBSD 7.2 to 7.3 VM (in KVM on Linux), it went fine but key presses go crazy, it’s annoying but this glitch is KVM related.
Knowing it went fine means I’m not apprehensive about my bare metal upgrades.
From others people’s feedback, an important first thing after the upgrade:
pkg_add -u
Yes, this is normal step anyway but people are getting caught off guard if they need to log in to an X environment (see /r/openbsd).
tux2bsd,
I assume that’s using the ps2 keyboard?
Is virtio an option?
“-device virtio-keyboard”
I don’t have any openbsd guests so I don’t know if it’s linux specific.
Or maybe a usb keyboard could give you better results?
Things to try anyways.
Thanks, I’ll give that a try (I had already attempted an attached a usb keyboard but it was still wonky).
For the KVM thing I mentioned: “Switch from the Spice display to VNC.”
from:
https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/m7glvw/openbsd_installer_has_broken_keyboard_under_linux/
tux2bsd,
Does that actually fix it for you? It doesn’t seem like it should. The emulated target, in this case OpenBSD and the bootloader for that matter should be completely oblivious to the front end client used to access VNC. And conversely if the spice protocol has a keyboard bug, it should be oblivious to the operating system being emulated. It’s quite mysterious. I wonder if the keyboard is a red herring and the actual issue is something completely different. For example spice supports audio redirection so theoretically an audio driver/codec problem could cause CPU/bandwidth instabilities that could appear as an unresponsive/stick keyboard even though the keyboard is only a side effect…?
Does top show 100% CPU load sustained for qemu/kvm or spice client?
I assume you’ve enabled kvm “-enable-kvm”? Sometimes that’s easy to overlook if you’re running the command yourself.
If you haven’t managed to find a solution, I can try to give it a go here and together we might be able to get to the root of it.