Contributed by tj on 2016-03-29 from the early-fish-gets-the-iso dept.

The release of OpenBSD 5.9, previously scheduled for the usual May 1st, has just been officially announced!

We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 5.9. This is our 39th release on CD-ROM (and 40th via FTP/HTTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than twenty years with only two remote holes in the default install.

The release page mentions most of the major improvements, and the detailed changelog has a much longer list. Here are some of the bigger things incorporated into 5.9 that we're excited about.

Pledge

With a great Hackfest presentation to lay out all the details, pledge(2) is one of the more prominent changes. We say prominent, but you actually shouldn't notice any difference with it enabled... assuming all your applications behave correctly. Much work has been done in this area, with around 70% of the OpenBSD userland being modified to use pledge within a single release cycle! A few ports also got the same treatment - something to expect more of as time goes on.

UEFI

Many new laptops come with UEFI now, some without an option to fall back to a traditional BIOS. With the 5.9 release, OpenBSD can now be booted on such machines.

GPT

Assuming you're on the amd64 platform, support for GPT has been vastly improved throughout the OS. The installer has been updated to accommodate as well, and it even works on softraid(4) volumes.

Rewritten less

The less(1) we're all familiar with has been completely rewritten. After importing a fork from illumos' Garrett D'Amore, OpenBSD continued to make improvements to the code. A safer and more modern tool was the end result, even if it's just for viewing text. Hopefully there will be less bugs now.

Xen domU

If running OpenBSD under Xen (such as on Amazon's cloud platform) sounds interesting to you, you'll be happy to know that 5.9 includes some pretty solid support for this.

Graphics

Laptop users rejoice, as 5.9 includes graphics support for Intel's Broadwell and Bay Trail GPUs!

Network SMP

Many improvements have been made to get the network stack running multithreaded. There's still plenty more to do in this area, but some exciting progress has definitely been made already.

802.11n

Another big one for laptop users: initial support for N wireless has landed in both the iwm(4) and iwn(4) drivers.