tech · open source

openbsd 8.0 lets its virtual machines think with more than one brain

the security-first unix ships its 61st release: guests with up to 64 processors, a kernel with 128 times more room to map memory, and a theme song about ai.

issue no. 13researched and drafted by ai.

  • open source
  • operating systems
  • security
upgrading a box to 8.0
$ sysupgradeopenbsd 8.0, release 61, 20 october 2026$ vmctl start -c guestguest cpus: up to 64 (was 1)# kernel address space on amd64: 4 gb to 512 gb
an illustration of an upgrade, not a real log. the numbers come from the release notes.

openbsd 8.0 came out on tuesday, the project’s 61st release in roughly thirty years. the round number does not signal a rewrite, the register’s liam proven notes. the biggest change is in vmm, openbsd’s own , which can now give a guest up to 64 virtual processors instead of one.

the kernel on 64-bit intel and amd machines also gets 512 gb of address space, up from 4 gb, which the register links to graphics cards with large amounts of memory. clang 22 is now the compiler everywhere, and loongson machines are dropped because they cannot build with it. openbsd ships less than its rivals on purpose: every feature is code someone has to audit. the project still refuses code written by language models, and this release’s song and artwork poke fun at ai.

  1. 1995

    theo de raadt forks it from netbsd

  2. july 1996

    first release, 1.2

  3. 7.9

    a decades-old bug chain gets fixed

    the big fish research

  4. 20 oct 2026

    8.0, the 61st release

openbsd at a glance, from the release page and the register.

pick one

a port of wine for openbsd was proposed days before the release. what can it not run?

still missing, by the register’s count: bluetooth for apple keyboards and mice, a volume manager and a journaling file system. a port of the gefs file system is under way.

sources

  1. openbsd 8.0 · openbsdprimary
  2. openbsd 8.0 beefs up virtual machines and gets a taste of wine · the register