In a groundbreaking event that has rocked the tech world to its very core, OpenBSD 7.6 was released this evening. Reports indicate that as many as three people are genuinely thrilled about this news, marking a 50% increase from the last release when only two people cared.
What’s New in OpenBSD 7.6?
- Support for Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite SoCs: Because nothing says “elite” like running a niche operating system on your smartphone. Now you can confuse the hell out of your friends when they ask to borrow your phone to make a call.
- Initial Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge boot support: Great news for all those Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge users out there! Both of you can now boot OpenBSD in ACPI mode. We’re sure this will revolutionize your… well, something.
- ARM64 Spectre Mitigations: OpenBSD now protects you from Spectre-V4 and Spectre-BHB on ARM64. Because when you’re running an OS that 99.9% of hackers don’t even remember exists, you need protection from cutting-edge vulnerabilities.
- RISC-V Support for Milk-V Pioneer board: In a move that’s sure to excite dozens of people worldwide, OpenBSD now supports the Milk-V Pioneer board. Finally, you can run your obscure OS on your obscure hardware! It’s like a match made in hipster heaven.
- AVX-512 Support on AMD64: OpenBSD has finally implemented AVX-512 support. Now you can perform complex vector calculations at lightning speed, which will come in handy when you’re… um… calculating how many people actually use OpenBSD?
The Human Impact
We interviewed Giles Techbottom, one of the three excited users, about the release. “It’s about time they added support for the Milk-V Pioneer board,” he said, adjusting his thick-rimmed glasses. “Now I can finally run my custom-compiled, security-hardened, Morse code-based chat client on proper hardware.”
Another user, who wished to remain anonymous (probably out of embarrassment), stated, “The AVX-512 support is a game-changer. Do you know how fast I can now generate random numbers for my paranoia-driven, tin-foil-hat-inspired encryption algorithms? It’s insane!”
The third excited user couldn’t be reached for comment, as they were too busy recompiling their kernel for the 17th time today.
What This Means for the Future
With OpenBSD 7.6’s release, we can only imagine what groundbreaking features will come in version 7.7. Perhaps they’ll add support for running the OS on a toaster, or maybe they’ll implement a new security feature that requires users to solve a Rubik’s Cube before logging in.
One thing’s for sure: the three people who care about OpenBSD will be waiting with bated breath, their mechanical keyboards at the ready, prepared to flood the single OpenBSD forum with posts about how this is definitely the year of OpenBSD on the desktop.
In the meantime, the rest of the world will continue to use normal operating systems, blissfully unaware that they’re missing out on the cutting-edge experience of troubleshooting driver issues for hardware that was outdated five years ago.
Stay tuned for our next article: “Linux Kernel 6.5 Released: Dozens of People Mildly Interested.”