OpenBSD is a complete, free, cross-platform Unix-like operating system based on BSD.
is presented the release of the new version of the popular UNIX OS, “OpenBSD 7.3” than the rest of the operating system itself, the OpenBSD project is known for its components, which have become widespread in other systems and have proven to be one of the safest and highest quality solutions.
Of the novelties that are presented in the new version of OpenBSD 7.3, it stands out that waitid system calls implemented (waiting for a process status change), pinsyscall (to pass information about the executive entry point to protect against ROP exploits), getthrname and setthrname (get and set thread name).
All architectures use clockintr , a hardware-independent timer interrupt scheduler.
Added sysctl kern.autoconf_serial, which can be used to monitor device tree state changes in the kernel from user space.
Another of the changes presented in the new version is that they have been implemented features for additional protection of process memory in user space: the mimmutable system call and the associated library function of the same name, which allows you to fix access rights when they are reflected in memory (memory allocations).
After pinning, the rights set for the memory area, for example, the prohibition to write and execute, cannot be subsequently changed through subsequent calls to the mmap(), mprotect() and munmap() functions, which , when trying to change, will generate an EPERM error.
OpenBSD 7.3 also highlights the improved support for systems multiprocessor (SMP). The event filters for tun and tap devices have been converted to mp-safe, plus blocking in the pf packet filter has been improved and also improved system and network stack performance on multicore systems.
The added support for newer Ryzen 7xxx GPU models , as well as added support for backlight control in amdgpu and made xbacklight work when using the mode configuration X.Org driver. Mesa has shader caching enabled by default.
On the other hand, Exploit protection is enabled based on the random binding of the sshd executable at each system boot. Rebinding makes it difficult to predict function offsets in sshd, which makes it difficult to create exploits that use return-oriented programming techniques.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Improvements have been made to the VMM hypervisor.
- The implementation of the framework drm (Direct Rendering Manager) is in sync with Linux kernel 6.1.15 (5.15.69 in previous version).
- On the AMD64 architecture, the RETGUARD protection mechanism is enabled for system calls, the purpose of which is to complicate the execution of exploits created with code snippets and return-oriented programming techniques.
- More aggressive stack location randomization on 64-bit systems.
- Added protection against Specter-BHB vulnerability in processor microarchitecture structures.
- On ARM64 processors, the DIT (Data Independent Timing) flag is enabled for user-space and kernel-space to block side-channel attacks that manipulate the instruction runtime's dependency on data processed in these instructions.
- Provides the ability to use lladdr when defining network configurations. For example, in addition to binding to the interface name, you can also bind to the MAC address.
- Improved hibernation support for ARM64 based systems.
- Significantly expanded support for Apple ARM chips.
- Added support for new hardware and included new drivers.
- The bwfm driver for wireless cards based on Broadcom and Cypress chips implements encryption support for WEP.
- The installer has improved work with software RAID and implemented initial support for Guided Disk Encryption.
- Added new scroll up and down commands to tmux ("multiplexer terminal") to scroll the cursor up and down.
- Updated LibreSSL and OpenSSH packages.
Finally for the interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link.
Download and get OpenBSD 7.3
For those interested in being able to obtain the new version, they should know that the size of the full installation ISO image of the base system OpenBSD 7.3 is 620MB.