OpenBSD/amd64

OpenBSD/amd64 runs on AMD's Athlon-64 family of processors in 64-bit mode.

It also runs on the upcoming Intel ia32e processors which contain cloned support for the AMD64 extensions, but since Intel left out support for the page table NXE bit (No-EXecute) there is no W^X support on the Intel cpus.

Note that OpenBSD/i386 also runs on these processors, but in 32-bit mode.

Table of contents

• Current status
• Getting and installing OpenBSD/amd64

Current status:

It can be expected to install and run with minimal difficulty on most current hardware.

A few problems exist with the bootblocks, kvm libraries, and some floating point operations. Obviously this is fairly new, so it will take time to find other issues and fix them.

Getting and installing OpenBSD/amd64:

Snapshots are made available from time to time, in this location as well as in a few mirrors. Here are the OpenBSD/amd64 snapshot installation instructions as well.

There are several installation media provided:

• CD boot

  Booting off the CD provides an El Torito 2.88MB floppy image that contains almost all OpenBSD drivers. This also includes minimal USB support (storage devices and keyboard).
  For the latest list of drivers available on this image, take a look at the RAMDISK_CD kernel configuration file.

• Floppy A (floppy34.fs)

  This 1.44MB floppy image contains the most common drivers. It is designed to cover the most typical PC. As a general rule, you will find that the missing drivers are ones which need large microcodes to run, such as for rare scsi cards, gigabit ethernet cards, or RAID devices.
  For the latest list of drivers available on this image, take a look at the RAMDISK kernel configuration file.