OpenBSD 6.6 Released Early

OpenBSD's second of its biannual releases came early again this year with the release of OpenBSD 6.6 last week; while this post comes late.

For anyone who isn't yet aware, Theo's announcement came a few days ago on Thursday, October 17 to the relevant mailing lists.

Among the many changes are:

• sysupgrade(8): an automatic upgrade utility that performs release and snapshot upgrades with one command
• LibreSSL 3.0.2: a new release of the project's OpenSSL fork
• sshsig: a minimal signature and verification utility for ssh-keygen(1)
• OpenSSH 8.1: a new release of the project's ubiquitous ssh protocol implementation
• tmux improvements: including regex support in search, match, and substitute modifiers, menus, selection auto-scroll, and more
• relayd(8): added support for OCSP stapling
• system-wide improvements in the wireless & network stack, hardware support, security, SMP, virtualisation, and much more

You can view the entire changelog for a complete rundown.

If upgrading from 6.5, the new sysupgrade(8) utility was made available in a syspatch(8) update earlier this month, so all you need to do is run sysupgrade—after reading the Upgrade Guide of course (and running syspatch if you haven't done so since before October 3).

If you're considering running OpenBSD for the first time—there's no better time—you most definitely should! You can get an OpenBSD VM through OpenBSD Amsterdam, which is where this site is hosted. Their VMs come fully installed and setup so all you need to do is ssh into your new box. And checkout OpenBSD Jumpstart for a great introduction to some of the core features and uses of OpenBSD, then get started—you won't ever go back!

And please consider making a donation directly to the project. Even if you're not using the operating system, there's a very good chance you're utilising software developed by the project.