The OpenBSD project has shipped OpenBSD 7.9, its 60th release, out the door on May 19, 2026. The philosophy hasn’t budged: correct code, secure defaults and integrated cryptography, all on the steady two-releases-a-year cadence the project has kept for decades.
What is OpenBSD and who is it for
OpenBSD is a free operating system from the BSD family, known for an almost obsessive focus on security, code auditing and safe defaults. Its development gave us tools you probably use without thinking about it: OpenSSH, LibreSSL, the PF firewall and tmux. It targets system administrators, security teams and networking projects (firewalls, routers, servers), plus anyone who wants a minimalist, consistent and well-documented system.
Highlights of OpenBSD 7.9
- Improved scheduler for heterogeneous CPUs: a new mechanism manages cores running at different speeds through the
hw.blockcpusysctl, and kernel mutexes swap spinlocks for parking locks. - More supported hardware: a new
ice(4)driver on arm64, broader Rockchip SoC support with RK3588 and RK3576, a USB4 controller driver (nhi(4)), and initial support for the SpacemiT K1 SoC. - Stronger security: the
tmppathpromise is gone from pledge(2),__pledge_open(2)arrives for controlled libc file access, and mount-point handling in unveil(2) gets tighter. - A more capable network stack: the
veb(4)bridge becomes VLAN-aware, checksum offload and TSO work between rdomains, PF gains source and state limiters, and IPv6 autoconfiguration (SLAAC) is on by default. - Smarter suspend: delayed hibernation lands so suspend stops draining the battery.
- Updated packages: over 12,000 prebuilt packages, including Firefox 150, GNOME 49, KDE Plasma 6.6, PostgreSQL 18.3, Rust 1.94 and Python 3.13.
As always, the update ships new versions of OpenSSH, LibreSSL and PF improvements, keeping OpenBSD where it has long sat: as a security benchmark.
See the full profile at /en/openbsd for downloads, requirements and version history.