r/openbsd

I have an Acer desktop (details below) with an SSD for the OS, data and programs and a SATA disk (WDC WD10EZEX-21W) for movies, backup etc. I ran OpenBSD snapshots on it, but installed Fedora Workstation 44 (Linux localhost-live.home 7.0.4-200.fc44.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC x86_64 GNU/Linux) on the SSD. Still in OpenBSD I copied all the stuff I needed from the SSD to the SATA disk. Now I'm trying to mount the disk under Fedora. I made a mount point (/mnt/ffs), ran

sudo modprobe ufs

(which was successful)

and

sudo sfdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 119.24 GiB, 128035676160 bytes, 250069680 sectors

Disk model: HFS128G39TND-N21

Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

Disklabel type: gpt

Disk identifier: 1E7167E1-FB76-42C6-A315-A30CDC51E87D

Device Start End Sectors Size Type

/dev/sda1 2048 1230847 1228800 600M EFI System

/dev/sda2 1230848 5425151 4194304 2G Linux extended boot

/dev/sda3 5425152 250068991 244643840 116.7G Linux filesystem

Disk /dev/sdb: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors

Disk model: WDC WD10EZEX-21W

Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

Disklabel type: dos

Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type

/dev/sdb4 * 64 1953520064 1953520001 931.5G a6 OpenBSD

then I ran:

sudo mount -t ufs -o ufstype=44bsd,ro /dev/sdb4 /mnt/ffs

and got:

mount: /mnt/ffs: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb4, missing codepage or helper program, or other error. dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.

Output of sudo dmesg|rg ufs\|sdb

[    0.691069] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/932 GiB)
[    0.691073] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] 4096-byte physical blocks
[    0.691094] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[    0.691096] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[    0.691107] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[    0.691126] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Preferred minimum I/O size 4096 bytes
[    0.724453]  sdb: sdb4
                sdb4: <openbsd: sdb5 >
[    0.724837] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[ 9104.581483] ufs: ufs_fill_super(): fragment size 8192 is too large

System info:

Acer product: Aspire X3-780

Mobo: Acer model: Aspire X3-780(KBL) Firmware: UEFI

vendor: American Megatrends v: R02-A3 date: 05/26/2017

CPU:

Info: quad core model: Intel Core i5-7400 bits: 64 type: MCP arch: Kaby Lake rev: 9 cache:

L1: 256 KiB L2: 1024 KiB L3: 6 MiB

Is this enough info to be helpful? I can of course post a full dmesg and other details. Needless to say any pointers are warmly welcome, thanks in advance.

[[ cross posted to r/Fedora ]]

I just wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude to the OpenBSD developers.

​I’ve recently built a few firewalls using pf, and they have performed flawlessly. After years of dealing with various systems, I keep coming back to OpenBSD for the "sane by default" philosophy and the sheer elegance of the base system.

It is rare to find a project that maintains such high standards of code correctness and documentation while keeping things so simple to manage.

​To show my appreciation, I’ve just made a contribution to the OpenBSD Foundation.

It’s a small way to say thanks for the incredible work you guys put into this.

Thank you.

I always download to /tmp and despise having ~/Downloads. I have the following in user.js but the directory still gets created.

user_pref("browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel", false); user_pref("browser.download.dir", "/tmp"); user_pref("browser.download.folderList", 2); user_pref("browser.download.lastDir", "/tmp"); user_pref("browser.download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir", true);

~/Downloads is commented out in /etc/firefox/unveil.{content,main}

I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly when it's created but if I delete it while FF is running, it will recreate when I quit.

Any chance there's a way to not allow FF to create it?

Hello folks,

I need your wisdom here. I'm planning to buy a new machine to use with OpenBSD on my daily basis. I had a good experience with Thinkpads t60 and x220, I must say but I'm wondering if is there any modern hardware sucessor ( in terms of compatibility and functionality ) to these machines.

So, what recommendations of laptops ( or even PCs ) you have for comfortable experience ( stable ) with OpenBSD in 2026 ?

I want to use a small desktop as a second router behind my virgin router to separate a home lab from my other devices at home. I was looking at refurbished Lenovos with the intention of adding a usb ethernet adapter.

It will be the first time I've tried this and so don't want to spend a fortune.

Can anyone recommend anything that is known to work well? and doesn't cost a fortune.

While the very first UNIX-like I installed on a machine was Corel Linux, I didn't actually use it. My true daily driver for a time was OpenBSD. Don't remember the first version I used, but I do remember buying the CDs several times. Waiting for the packages to arrive (to Argentina) was great.

I wrote a simple script to remove unneeded dependencies before that was a supported feature :) See: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=115169227205216&w=2 and https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=126196050214844&w=2 Those were my first steps in shell scripting. Long before I succumbed to GNUisms :)

Nowadays I run Linux Mint and know why that won't change, but I'm waiting for 7.9 to come out to install it on a spare Lenovo T470 I have, and give it a ride for the nostalgia. I plan to run IceWM on it, like back in the day. Hopefully it supports my Wi-Fi.

I'm trying to get the basic necessities working on my 2022 m2 mac I posted about earlier. I'm specifically missing the firmware file apple-bwfm/brcmfmac4387c2-pcie.apple,hokkaido.bin. I can infer that this file wasn't included in the distribution because it's proprietary, but where can I find it?

I've done some light digging for it, it seems like it exists somewhere within the asahi project? and also I heard tell of an official apple endpoint that I might be able to download this from, but I'm stuck.

(my backup plan if I can't figure this out is to just bite the bullet and switch to Asahi Fedora.. But I'm hoping I can figure it out without too much trouble!)

Thanks for any help!!

Hello again all,

I was wondering if any of you could point me to some resources to learn more about the process of porting the Linux DRM subsystem and GPU drivers over to OpenBSD (and Linux's DRM sub-system itself). How hard is it to import all that code to support modern Intel and AMD GPUs? What does OpenBSD do differently compared to Linux when using the DRM API?

I've had no issues with the GPU drivers on my modernish AMD GPU. But last night something went wonky with my ability to decode video using the GPU (playing video in mpv using yt-dlp). It fell back to using the CPU to render videos. I thought maybe yt-dlp needed an update because google broke things again but that was not the case. Later on I closed the browser I'd had open for weeks (Firefox) and it refused to run when I tried to start it again. It core dumped and threw an error related to the DRM subsystem that I didn't write down. Since I force enabled some stuff in about:config related to GPU acceleration.

I need to grep through logs to see if I can figure out what went wrong. I had a working system otherwise. A reboot fixed it but I'd never had this issue with OpenBSD before even if I left the system on for weeks. I wonder if it was related to it being suspended for multiple days.

All of this got me wondering about how the OpenBSD kernel interacts with modern GPUs and how much effort is required to port all that stuff over from Linux. I've heard modern GPU drivers are a mess (tons of code) but I've never tried looking at the code myself.

Initially, I manually made my chroot environment. Things seemed to be going well until clamd/freshclam failed to start, due to failing to find .so files.

Then I thought that it would be a bit of pain to keep this updated, and why i couldnt get pkg_add to work. Came across this: ​https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/730438/how-to-install-packages-in-chroot-when-chroot-is-launched-with-doas

Makes a lot more sense to just unpack the sets. (A bit heavier but I don't mind.) Unfortunately, ldconfig fails (with pledge throwing an error). pkg_add works but I see diff throwing similar pledge errors. And, of course, clamd/freshclam fail with the same missing libraries.

So, what is the proper way of setting up a new chroot?​

I am currently using the gtk2 binary of emacs from the ports tree and it has been working fine for several years now. I know a lot of people dislike emacs and I'm considering moving away from it myself. But so far haven't found anything that can replace org-mode and emacs is helpful for viewing several types of documents like epubs, cbz, pdf and various other misc. files. I also like bookmarks and take advantage of many other things for creating documents.

I have been wanting to rid my system of gtk totally for awhile now. But as far as I know it's impossible if I want a modern web browser (I use firefox mainly but also have the chromium port installed just in case).

I'm worried emacs will remove support for gtk2 in the near future like a lot of gtk projects have done. I see there is the option to use motif instead although I've not used it in many years. I was going to check it out but it's no longer offered as a binary. I checked out the ports tree with CVS and attempted to build the motif version from source. But it failed with an error I can't remember at the moment (it was months ago when I tried this).

I'm wondering why the motif option is still offered at all if it fails to build. I tried searching on the ports mailing list but I didn't see any discussion about it. Is anyone running the motif version of the port and if so how did you get it going? Will I lose any features if I move over to motif instead of using the gtk2 version? I didn't find much information about this in the emacs documentation.

Concerning the kernel:

I know it's discourage to use anything but GENERIC but I'd like to help more with testing and I'm wondering if there are any advantages if I build from source. I've been used to building kernels from source in most other OSs I've used over the years. I know there are some obscure features that aren't enabled by default in the GENERIC kernel because they aren't stable on all platforms. Is there anything I could get on amd64 going if I build from source instead of using GENERIC?

I'd like to get more familiar with building ports from src along with the base system and Xenocara. Xenocara is a bit of a black box to me at the moment. I'm pretty familiar with Xorg but I'd like to understand the Xenocara build system and changes that were made in it compared to upstream.

With the recent stuff happening with Xorg's upstream and the fact that they haven't accepted any patches from Xenocara in a long time (or ever?) I'm curious if there are any plans to try and upstream some changes to one of the forks. I believe Xlibre is the most popular right now but I haven't really looked too deeply in to it. All I know is they forked Xorg from an older version for some reason and there was a big stink about it when it was initially announced. But I see that some Linux distros are offering it now and I think a couple have moved to using it by default. Is there anything worthwhile in their fork that Xenocara could benefit from? At the very least they seem more open to accepting diffs than FreeDesktop. Maybe they'd be willing to share some of the burden of maintaining the patch set. Or has Xenocara diverged so much at this point that it'd be a huge pain to switch to a different upstream?

Hi everyone, I need to set up Wireguard on an OpenBSD VPS in order to access IPv6 from wherever I am. However, despite many tries, I cannot get it to work.

What I want to do is simple: I want to be able to connect to the VPS using Wireguard so that Wireguard can forward all the IPv6 traffic generating from the connected PC to the outside world through the VPS.

I tried following a few guides on setting up Wireguard on OpenBSD, one from Vultr and another from this website, but without success.

My current config files are the following:

/etc/wireguard/wg0.conf

[Interface]
PrivateKey = (hidden)
ListenPort = 42069

[Peer]
PublicKey = (hidden)
AllowedIPs = fd00:1::2/128
PersistentKeepalive = 25

/etc/hostname.wg0

inet6 fd00:1::1 64
up
!/usr/local/bin/wg setconf wg0 /etc/wireguard/wg0.conf

As for /etc/pf.conf I really don't know what to write. Even if the file doesn't specify anything relative to the wg0 interface, it still doesn't work.

What am I doing wrong?

Edit: The Wireguard server actually worked with the setup got from the guide I linked at the beginning. I was just unable to test it because, for some reason, pinging some addresses doesn't work even if they are reachable from the VPS.

Anybody else having this issue?

I am using Chromium 145.0.7632.109 and OpenBSD 7.8 (GENERIC.MP) #7: Tue Apr 14 04:12:37 MDT 2026 GENERIC.MP

When I try and upload a pic to post to Instagram I get a "Something went wrong. Please try again." message.

It works if I use Firefox. So it isn't the pic or my IG account.

I tried disabling my plugins and with the below command line.

chrome --no-sandbox --disable-unveil

Any thoughts on how to debug this? Not sure when it started, but somewhat recently. I.e. it used to work. The pic is in ~/Downloads .

Thanks.

Does openbsd support radeon pro w7000 series cards? Want to build a workstation but would like openbsd compatibility since I like openbsd. Also, do Intel arc cards work? they're my second choice