14 DAY TRIAL // OpenBSD, a free, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system, which emphasizes portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptograph, is now at version 5.2.
OpenBSD releases are few and far in between, so when they actually show up, they have an amazing number of changes, updates and features.
According to the developers, the most significant change in this release is the replacement of the user-level uthreads by kernel-level rthreads, allowing multithreaded programs to utilize multiple CPUs/cores.
A lot of other changes such as hibernation support for i386, AMD Hudson-2 support, performance improvements for Intel 10Gb Ethernet NICs, have been implemented.
Highlights of OpenBSD 5.2;
• pthread spinlock and barrier routines have been added; • Handling for rusage totals and interval timers in threaded processes has been improved; • Changed the RLIMIT_NPROC rlimit to count processes instead of threads; • A new system limit kern.maxthread for the max number of threads has been added; • Handling of threaded processes in ps(1), top(1), and fstat(1) has been improved; • Support for ALPS based touchpads in wsmouse(4) and the synaptics(4) X.Org input driver, has been implemented; • Hardware watchdog and HPET support for tcpcib(4) (Intel Atom E600) has been implemented, as found in some embedded x86 systems; • Support for the SMBus controller of the AMD CS5536 in glxpcib(4) and the NVIDIA MCP89 in nviic(4) has been added; • The sgi port now supports the R4000 Indigo (IP20), Indy (IP22), R4000 Indigo2 (IP24) and POWER Indigo2 R10000 (IP28) families; • Better etherip and BGP protocol support in tcpdump(8) has been implemented; • Various fixes to improve error reporting in bgpd(8) including support of RFC 6608, have been added; • pf(4) now ignores/preserves the lower 2 bits of the tos-header (used for Explicit Congestion Notification); • Added nginx(8), an HTTP server, reverse proxy server and mail proxy server.
Check out the massive changelog for a complete list of updates and new features.
Download OpenBSD 5.2 right now from Softpedia.