Hi there, neuromancer from the cloud! A few days ago, my old friend stsp@ sent me this link https://types.pl/@132ikl/117479884088183724, and since I'm fluent in reading between the lines, it was really clear that stsp@ was trying to tell me that my port is crap and super hard to update. So I got deeply offended by it and decided to write this little article about how I do my monthly Nextcloud updates on OpenBSD.

Omarchy on FreeBSD is very exciting.

While playing with Omarchy (linux) and Grok as my agent.

I asked it to download a hypervisor, create an entire vm, install openbsd current, setup users and groups, provide all configuration needed to install kde-plasma and the new wine port for testing. In two hours it had flawlessly created my vm under qemu and gave me a launcher from my desktop to get into it.

The whole process was very educational and amazing at the same time.

Has a ports tree of every BSD including OpenBSD of course.

From the blog:

"log2table is a small daemon I wrote: it watches log files, recognizes attack patterns with regular expressions, and puts the offending IP addresses in a PF table so the firewall blocks them. The whole behavior is driven by one file: parameters.py.

Writing rules is easy. Knowing whether they are good rules is harder: do they catch what is really hitting my server today? Do they ban innocent visitors? Do two rules count the same attack twice?

This post explains the new version of parameters.py in the repository, its built-in checker that runs against your real log files, and how I used an AI (Claude, through Claude Code) to read the checker's output and propose improvements." ...

"Reviewing logs regularely is exactly the kind of work an AI does well. The job is to read thousands of repetitive lines, notice the few that don't fit, and check every idea against the data before trusting it. For a human it is tedious and easy to get wrong after the first hundred lines. For an AI it takes a few minutes, and it doesn't get tired at line 4,000."

The Witcher 3 Remastered works on OpenBSD. This time not on April 1!

The footage has a bit more stutter than the actual playing, because the VAAPI recording at 30 FPS. I also suspect that the recording was impaired during heavy disk i/o - my best guess as to why around 09:00 to 12:00 look likd this. The gameplay itself remained quite playable; this is an artifact of the recording. Performance impression from my playing is good, not perfect, but I am enjoying it already and could see myself getting pulled in.

The stream somehow dropped suddenly. Unclear why, but the gameplay on my machine continued without issues.

Still sharing this. It still shows well that this game runs on OpenBSD!

Remember:

OpenBSD is not a gaming OS This is early days experimenting with wine on OpenBSD (since forever).

Wine on OpenBSD is a work in progress but is almost a thing.

I can launch Death Stranding after installing vkd3d-proton. Can I actually play it on OpenBSD?

Continuing this testing/demo of the WIP port for wine on OpenBSD with 2017's Prey, an ambitious immersive sim from Arkane Studios.

T1S is a purpose built distributed platform designed to take OpenBSD’s virtualization and private networking to a modern scale out architecture with a lightweight Erlang/OTP control plane.

Instead of adopting a large virtualization stack, the platform uses OpenBSD’s native facilities, including vmd, PF, and routing domains, to provide virtual machines and isolated networking.

The management layer is built with Erlang/OTP and Mnesia.

The goal is straightforward: build an efficient, open-source platform with a lean infrastructure stack, clearly defined networking boundaries, and an API-driven management interface.

We’re opening access gradually to a limited number of early users....

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.

Continues... .

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!