In a message to relevant mailing lists, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) announced that the OpenBSD project's 47^th release, OpenBSD 6.6, is now available from mirror sites worldwide.

Rather than reproducing here the full list of new features, we refer readers to the official OpenBSD 6.6 page, and the detailed changelog.

Notable changes include but are not limited to:

• sysupgrade(8) has been added. (Fortunately for those upgrading, this has been retrofitted to 6.5.)
• The octeon platform now uses clang(1) as the base compiler.
• amdgpu(4), an AMD GPU driver, has been added.
• startx(1) and xinit(1) again work on many modern systems.
• unveil(2) has been improved, and is now used in 77 base programs.
• ntpd(9) now gets and sets the clock in a secure manner when booting, even in the absence of a battery-backed clock.
• smtpd(8) now supports builtin and [experimental] standalone filters.

Those upgrading from version 6.5 should read the Upgrade Guide.

As always, readers are encouraged to show their appreciation in the conventional manner.

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) posted to tech@:

Sometime in the last week OpenBSD crossed 400,000 commits (*) upon all
our repositories since starting at 1995/10/18 08:37:01 Canada/Mountain.
That's a lot of commits by a lot of amazing people.

(*) by one measure.  Since the repository is so large and old, there are
a variety of quirks including ChangeLog missing entries and branches not
converable to other repo forms, so measuring is hard.  If you think
you've got a great way of measuring, don't be so sure of yourself -- you
may have overcounted or undercounted.

Congratulations and thanks to all who contributed!

In a move bound to be greeted with great enthusiasm, the newly-released Patch 012 for OpenBSD 6.5 adds sysupgrade(8) to the system.

Readers are encouraged to show their appreciation by donating!

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has changed newvers.sh to 6.6:

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	src
Changes by:	deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org	2019/10/01 11:19:04

Modified files:
	sys/conf       : newvers.sh 

Log message:
stop this -current stuff

When updating packages on -current, pkg_add -D snap is now needed.

Theo also rolled the errata pages [which is why Undeadly's Errata listing is empty at the time of writing].

This serves as another excellent reminder to test both base and ports, and to report problems.

Support for the sgi hardware platform has been discontinued:

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	www
Changes by:	deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org	2019/09/25 05:28:00

Modified files:
	.              : plat.html 

Log message:
discontinue sgi.

(On the o350 (where builds happened for years) there is a dma / disk
controller bug which was never fully diagnosed and fixed in the driver.
it locks up the vfs layer after a while, and sometimes causes quite
catastrophic filesystem layout.  I have tired of repairing these situation.
The octeon platform is becoming more viable as a mips64 canarie, so we'll
carry on using it)

EuroBSDcon 2019 has concluded, and materials for the OpenBSD-related talks can be found in the usual place.

At the time of writing, official video recordings are not yet available, but the organisers assure us that they will be as soon as the editing is done.

Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) has recently committed changes which restore a certain amount of startx(1)/xinit(1) functionality for non-root users. The commit messages explain the situation:

On his blog, Gilles Chehade (gilles@) has written a very detailed article on running an OpenSMTPD mail server.

The article begins:

TL;DR:
- NO TL;DR: this time, I spent hours writing, you should spend minutes reading.
- OK... I explain in WAY TOO MUCH details how to setup a mail server

So if you have an interest in running your own mail service, you now have an excellent reference as a starting point.

On Monday, Otto (otto@) committed a small but significant change to the Firefox port.

Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2019 12:50:35 -0600 (MDT)
From: Otto Moerbeek <otto@[elided]>
To: ports-changes@openbsd.org
Subject: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: ports
Sender: owner-ports-changes@openbsd.org

CVSROOT:        /cvs
Module name:    ports
Changes by:     otto@cvs.openbsd.org    2019/09/09 12:50:35

Modified files:
        www/mozilla-firefox: Makefile
        www/mozilla-firefox/files: all-openbsd.js

Log message:
Disable DoH by default.  While encrypting DNS might be a good thing,
sending all DNS traffic to Cloudflare by default is not a good idea.
Applications should respect OS configured settings.
The DoH settings still can be overriden if needed. ok landry@ job@

If you are running your own DNS over HTTPS (DoH) server, you may want to point Firefox at it using the network.trr.uri configuration option in about:config, and overriding the network.trr.mode setting from Otto's change to 3. For more details on how to configure Firefox's use of DoH, please see their wiki.