OpenBSD 8.0 Drops Loongson, Rebases Graphics on Linux 6.18 and Ships OpenSSH 10.6

OpenBSD 8.0 shipped on October 20 with the kernel graphics drivers rebased on Linux 6.18.53, a 512G kernel address space on amd64 and the removal of the loongson port, which the project said was "not working with Clang 22."

The release page calls it the 61st release. The changelog since 7.9 lists the hardware work in more detail than the summary does.

What changes on the machines people run

On amd64 the kernel virtual address space grows from 4G to 512G, the pmap direct map is now placed at random, and swap encryption uses AES CPU instructions. arm64 gets the same swap change plus hibernate support. riscv64 gains the 'V' vector extension, Sstc timer support and the imsic and aplic interrupt drivers, and the changelog adds a PCIe and USB3 combo PHY for the Spacemit K3.

The drm(4) graphics code moves to Linux 6.18.53 and adds Intel Arc A-Series (DG2/Alchemist) support. Laptop-side additions include a touchscreen and battery monitor for the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge and NVMe attach on the HP Elitebook X G2q. Linux owners tracking new laptop silicon will recognise the pattern from our report on an RTX Spark laptop running Linux.

The virtual machine daemon vmd now allows up to 64 VCPUs per guest, with x2apic guest support and checksum offload.

OpenSSH 10.6 and the compression change

The bundled OpenSSH 10.6, released October 6 according to the OpenSSH release notes, disables the LZ77 dictionary coder. The notes describe a chosen-plaintext attack that uses a compression dictionary shared across multiplexed channels. The side effect is that the Compression option does less, and the project recommends application-level compression over SSH instead.

It also enables the hybrid ssh-mldsa44-ed25519 post-quantum signature algorithm, which the OpenBSD page still calls experimental. The OpenSSH notes say the name no longer carries the @openssh.com suffix, so keys generated under the earlier experimental name must be regenerated or removed.

For anyone who set Compression yes to speed up slow links, the change is felt as a slower transfer, not an error.

Bundled versions and package counts

Component	Version in 8.0
OpenSSH	10.6
LibreSSL	4.4.0
LLVM/Clang	22.1.6
Perl	5.42.3
Unbound	1.26.1

Among prebuilt packages the page lists Firefox 157.0 (ESR 153.4.0), GCC 16.1.0, Go 1.27.1, Rust 1.98.1, Python 3.14.7, PostgreSQL 18.6 and KDE Plasma 6.7.5. Two of the nine package-count lines, arm and powerpc, still read "XXX" on the page.

1. amd6413K packages
2. aarch6413K packages
3. riscv6411K packages
4. i38611K packages
5. sparc6411K packages
6. powerpc649564 packages
7. mips649072 packages

Source: OpenBSD 8.0 release page, accessed 2026-10-20

Smaller changes worth a look

tmux gains modal panes, a new-pane command, borderless menus and pane titles, which matters to anyone who drives agents through the multiplexer as described in our Orca coverage. httpd now rejects request smuggling patterns, and httpd and relayd both switched their default TLS cipher setting to "secure."

libexpat moves to 2.8.4, and the release fixes several CVEs in perl, nsd and X server components. The page names none of them, so a reader has to diff the errata to see which.

The two package-count placeholders are the open item: the project has not yet filled in the arm and powerpc totals.