OpenBSD 7.1

Sometimes significant releases (and I'd call one of OpenBSD's twice yearly ones including full support for a brand new set of silicon reasonable significant) are worth one resurface for those that missed it the first time around which is nearly inevitable. If there is enough interest it'll get on the front page again and can be useful. I'm definitely happy about the Apple Silicon support myself, more so then the comments the first time around. While I don't immediately plan to use it there right now, it'll mean a very solid second life for a lot of systems as Apple moves on.

And honestly even right now, the state of very compact high CPU performance PCs is actually kinda surprisingly mediocre. I've found myself researching it quite a bit from the perspective of gateway/firewall usage, where I've moved fully away from crappy proprietary appliances to doing it on standard systems. For racking stuff there are lots of great options and none of this would replace them. But if you want something more like a classic appliance in a small scale setting that's compact, very low energy, quiet, etc, but has more oomph than something like an RPi too. It's actually very easy to rapidly get into the $600+ range even for something with fairly mediocre performance.

Whereas a base Mac Mini M1 goes new for $700 and already floods the used market for $350-500, and has literally nearly an order of magnitude more performance than an RPi 4 while still only using 15W. It's almost double the single thread speed and +50% the multithread of the (admittedly now old, but also still what AMD is selling as their current embedded chip until Genoa) EPYC 3251 I have in a much more expensive system. Granted that has IPMI and a bunch of other non-CPU features that are very valuable to me, but still. And GPU and any GUI is perfectly irrelevant. The Mini could be an excellent option for a lot of appliance usage honestly which is a pretty surprising place to be but there it is.