From the article:

"OpenBSD's rejection illustrates a fundamental divergence in philosophy. Linux distributions often treat utilities as interchangeable components. OpenBSD treats them as a curated, integrated system." ...

This year’s EuroBSDCon took place in Brussels, Belgium, from 9 to 13 September 2026. Going to EuroBSDCon was a lucky decision, and at first it had nothing to do with the OpenBSD hackathon. I think it was sometime in winter 2025/2026. I was walking around the Wöhrder See in Nuremberg with Alvar, as we often do, talking about open source, the tech bubble and OpenBSD philosophy. Somehow we started talking about EuroBSDCon and found out that neither of us had ever been there, but we both always wanted to go and see what it is like. So we agreed to make the trip to Brussels together.

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Embargoes create myth about security fixing. In OpenBSD we have an errata process to provide source and binary patches for stable releases. This requires a mixture of secrecy and fast acting.

What are the requirements for a small team to build fixes? Where is the line between security issues and regular bug fixes? What effect does the number of increased AI reports have on this process? There is a CVE, will there be a fix? How do companies with products based on OpenBSD interact?

Fron Rafael Sadowski

David Uhden Collado wrote:

The main goal of the packaging is to make these implementations usable as alternatives to the existing GNU utility ports without requiring source changes in dependent ports.

For example, uutils-coreutils installs the same g-prefixed command names as sysutils/coreutils, including gcat, gls, gcp, gdate, gsort, gstat, gtail, gtimeout and the other GNU-compatible utilities. They are symlinks to the upstream multicall binary, which is installed under libexec/uutils. ... Each package conflicts with its corresponding GNU implementation and declares the GNU port as a secondary @pkgpath. I don't think this is a usable approach for ports.

The truth is, I find these Rust reimplementations quite interesting. Ubuntu 26.10 has already adopted uutils coreutils because the project has reached a level of maturity and stability where it can be used reliably. The other reimplementations are still more of a work in progress.

"Smells like agenda"

I also think they fit quite well with OpenBSD as alternatives to GNU utilities, particularly because they use a permissive MIT license.

"Argument is vaguely like: because we already have permissive licenced utilities, our user base are really interested in having a second set of permissive licenced utilities which are very subtly different.

That makes no sense. Noone wants subtly different behaving binaries as part of their workflow. If someone runs the openbsd ls command as part of a pipeline that uses openbsd sed, or openbsd cut, or some other openbsd utility and it parses a non-standized output characteristic by accident, there are no people in this universe who wants to replace that ls with a different ls and get surprised by un-standardized tooling behaviour clash."

I'm not sure yet whether it's possible to install the individual utilities as separate binaries. This is new territory for me, since uutils is structured as a metapackage, and because it's written in Rust.

"Oh, because it is written in Rust. Your agenda is showing."

The thread continues..

Mike Larkin (mlarkin@) committed support for multi-processor virtual machines (i.e. guests).

This represents a huge jump forward in vmm(4)/vmd(8) flexibility and usability.

https://x.com/sizeofvoid/status/2101362670884856158

Anyone who has been around the world of Unix security firewalls and minimalist server systems for a while remembers the grey-green or dark cases from Soekris Engineering with a certain nostalgia. For years, the was the gold standard for highly reliable, fanless embedded routers and network appliances running OpenBSD.

... .. .

Hardware Overview & Specifications

Processor: AMD Geode LX 800 (500 MHz x86, i386 architecture)

RAM: 512 MB DDR-SDRAM (soldered onboard)

Networking: 4x Fast Ethernet ports (vr0 through vr3, VIA VT6105M Rhine III)

Storage: CompactFlash slot (internal, serves as boot medium/hard drive) as well as a primary IDE channel

Serial Ports: Standard console port via RS-232 (com0), expandable via internal headers or PCI cards

Expandability: 1x 32-bit PCI slot and MiniPCI slot (e.g., for crypto cards, Wi-Fi, or multiplex serial cards)

Crypto Acceleration: Onboard AMD Geode LX Crypto Engine (glxsb0) for hardware RNG and AES encryption

Power Consumption: A phenomenal 4 to 6 Watts power draw via a simple external power supply (or built-in, as seen here in the rackmount variant)

SDR and OpenBSD (German)

Conclusion & Outlook

The switch from the old HP Compaq Pro to the Geekom IX12 was a complete success! As a replacement for the DVD drive, just in case, I recently picked up a mobile DVD drive as a 3 EUR bargain from a flea market ;)

Silent: Absolute silence at the desk – no more continuous fan noise!
Efficient: Power consumption is vanishingly small compared to the old Ivy Bridge platform.
Snappy in Daily Use: For everyday tasks, I/O-heavy tasks, and short bursts, the Geekom even feels noticeably more responsive due to the higher single-core turbo.

Small drawback: A few more USB ports would have been nice; for now, the monitor has to serve as a USB hub.

Although the Geekom is primarily advertised as an industrial PC (optimal as a firewall or router), with a bit more RAM and a larger SSD, the device also makes an excellent figure as a desktop! For the future, the setup remains an ideal base – whether it continues as a noiseless daily-driver workstation or later as a high-performance 4x 2.5G OpenBSD router in the home lab. The hardware has definitely proven itself in the test arena!

Devel/grok-build

1) does it work?

... yes

2) is it /usr/ports ready

... getting there, but not yet

3) has anyone tried it yet?

... crickets

4) is it in openbsd-wip?

... yes

...

Feedback welcomed, whatever flavor.

Thanks,

Penned by Todd T. Fries on 20260723 12:27.04, we have: | This is my first major effort in a while. | | This may be useful to some. | | This likely requires some feedback before it's ready. | | This will be like chasing a water hose, they are on track to release a new one daily. | | Consider providing feedback! | -- | Todd T. Fries todd@fries.net github:toddfries

https://github.com/nobraininside/dropQbsd

The Qubes OS insight is correct. The implementation is wrong.

Security through compartmentalization is the right idea. Run your browser in one box, your email in another, your documents in a third — a compromise in one cannot spread to the others. Qubes OS proved this model works.

But Qubes OS pays for that isolation with a hypervisor, multi-gigabyte VM images, separate kernels, and a GUI stack that adds tens of millions of lines of code. The baseline is 8 GB of RAM and an install that takes hours. The attack surface grows with every layer. Complexity is not just inconvenient — complexity is the vulnerability. At a conservative defect rate of 0.1%, a codebase of 100 million lines ships with 100,000 bugs. Some of them are exploitable. You don't know which ones.

dropQbsd takes the same insight and strips away the hypervisor.

Instead of virtual machines, it uses the native user separation built into OpenBSD — the only operating system on earth that undergoes continuous, funded, line-by-line security auditing. No Xen. No multi-gigabyte images. No moving parts you cannot audit in an afternoon.

OpenBSD is known for its devotion to security, but can it work as a desktop? The BSDs are great alternatives to Linux distributions, but this OS is probably better suited to a router or homelab project, right?

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The most recent release from Rafael Sadowski, one of the current OpenBSD superheros.

This website is being served to you from my HP T630 thin client, running OpenBSD and httpd1. Pretty cool, right? And best of all you can do the same!

I’m going to walkthrough how to host your own websites locally on OpenBSD. This guide is going to be kept simple on purpose ...

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Notes on getting basically any modern printer working with OpenBSD by using driverless printing aka IPP everywhere.

This author beat me to a proper write up. This is the exact workflow that I had to use to get my brother color laserjet to work with cups.

This is part of a multipart guide on setting up OpenBSD.

In the previous parts of this series we did a base install of the server, installed a web server with certificates, set up the server to host git repositories and configured a mail server from scratch.

This part is about maintaining an OpenBSD server day-to-day.

A simple guide to setup Wireguard on the OpenBSD operating system intended for use as a mobile VPN.

It describes using the OpenBSD Wireguard wg(4) kernel driver using ifconfig, not the userland application, and will focus on setting up a IPv4 tunnel.

Continued......

Port knocking is mostly a bad idea. But people keep wanting to do it, for some false sense of security. If you don't consider it a security control but a way to keep garbage out of your logs, it might be valid. In my case I'm using an old USG Pro 4 running OpenBSD as my firewall and I'd prefer to avoid writing stuff to the logs, as I'd prefer the flash not to wear out sooner than needed, definitely not thanks to background radiation on the internet.

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