OpenBSD 8. 0 brings bigger virtual machines, graphics improvements, and another helping of AI mockery. The round version number doesn’t signal a radical break with its predecessors. OpenBSD 8. 0 is the 61st release of the project. Developer Bryan Steele posted a highlights rundown on Mastodon. Wireless improvements include updates to the qwx driver for Qualcomm Wi-Fi 6 hardware. Its VMM/VMD hypervisor now supports multiprocessor VMs with up to 64 virtual CPUs in each guest. The kernel virtual memory address space on x86-64 is now 512 GB, up from 4 GB, allowing for GPUs with large amounts of VRAM. On Arm64 machines, OpenBSD supports hibernation, and on both x86-64 and Arm64 it can use CPU AES instructions for faster encrypted swap. Component upgrades include OpenSSH 10. 6 and LibreSSL 4. 4. 0, and the DRM graphics driver stack from Linux 6. 18. The default C compiler is Clang/LLVM 22, including for the SPARC64 edition – but at the cost of dropping support for the Loongson architecture. The list of errata is short, with just four fixes – but then, version 8. 0 is very new. Just days before this release, there was a high-profile OpenBSD issue: Calif’s "Big Fish" research describes a decades-old shared-memory bug chained with a separate kernel flaw to gain local root access. Both were fixed in OpenBSD 7. 9 , through errata 026 and 018 respectively. Project leader Theo de Raadt forked OpenBSD from NetBSD 1. 0 in 1995, and the first release of the new OS was OpenBSD 1. 2 in July 1996 – so version 8. 0 is as close as the project will get to a 30th anniversary release. According to Calif’s proof-of-concept code on GitHub , the bug was in the original code that both OpenBSD and NetBSD inherited from the original BSD codebase – which is how come there’s a 37-year-old bug in a 30-year-old project. A HackerNews comment says: "Interestingly, looks like this was accidentally fixed in NetBSD during a rewrite of that code in August of 1999." The project has not updated its infamous slogan. The homepage still proclaims: "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!" As we noted in May when OpenBSD 7. 9 appeared , the project rejects code generated by LLMs, although on the basis of licensing concerns rather than its cousin NetBSD’s explicit anti-AI stance . As we reported recently , this strict anti-AI stance seems to be serving NetBSD well. OpenBSD is also an anti-AI project, and for this release, the website goes out of its way to make that very clear. OpenBSD’s mascot is a pufferfish, and in the banner artwork for the new release, "Puffy" has an extra eye – and the signpost in the image’s background also has malformed text, a hallmark of early image-generation bots. The eyes are also constantly blinking – one at a time – to emphasize that this is a reference to Blinky the mutant fish from The Simpsons. In case you missed The Simpsons reference, the version 8. 0 release theme song makes it even more explicit: it’s titled "The Simps on AI."…