The project has released OpenBSD 6.2 which features many new drivers, particularly for the ARM architecture, and network packet handling performance improvements. Some key features have been added to the system installer too, including checking for security updates on the system’s first boot: “Installer improvements: The installer now uses the Allotment Routing Table (ART). A unique kernel is now created by the installer to boot from after install/upgrade. On release installs of architectures supported by syspatch, “syspatch -c” is now added to rc.firsttime. Backwards compatibility code to support the ‘rtsol’ keyword in hostname.if(5) has been removed. The install.site and upgrade.site scripts are now executed at the end of the install/upgrade process. More detailed information is shown to identify disks. The IPv6 default router selection has been fixed. On the amd64 platform, AES-NI is used if present.“
Song – Coming in December
Note: OpenBSD is a project released under the BSD 2-Clause license.
This license is recognized as free license, but is not copyleft.
P.S.
Creating a bootable USB key using a Un*x-like system:
Some older systems may not be able to boot from USB keys or require
changing boot priority. Check your BIOS settings if you run into
problems.
First, you will need to obtain a local copy of the bootable filesystem
image miniroot59.fs or install59.fs as described above.
You should use the signify(1) and sha256(1) commands to verify
the integrity of the images with the SHA256.sig file on the mirror site.
Next, use the dd(1) utility to copy the file to the USB storage device.
The command would likely be, under OpenBSD:
dd if=miniroot59.fs of=/dev/rsdNc bs=1m
where N is the device number. You can find the correct device number
by checking dmesg(8) when inserting the media.
If you are using another operating system, you may have to adapt
this to conform to local naming conventions for the USB key and
options suitable for copying to a "raw" disk image. The key
issue is that the device name used for the USB key *must* be one
that refers to the correct block device, not a partition or
compatibility mode, and the copy command needs to be compatible
with the requirement that writes to a raw device must be in
multiples of 512-byte blocks. The variations are endless and
beyond the scope of this document.
If you're doing this on the system you intend to boot the USB key on,
copying the image back to a file and doing a compare or checksum
is a good way to verify that the USB key is readable and free of
read/write errors.
Happy OpenBSD 😀
