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OpenBSD laptops
- nils-m-holm 11y agoI'd love to run OpenBSD on my laptop computers, but last time I tried (5.7), the fan on my Dell Latitude 6410 was permanently on, while on FreeBSD with performance_cx_lowest="Cmax" the fan barely runs at all. As much as I love OpenBSD, this is a knock-out criterium to me. Has the situation improved significantly since 5.7?
- frenkel 11y agoDid you run apmd with the conservative option?
- mfincham 11y agoCPU power management support has improved in 5.8. Better ACPI support and the drivers now use more lower-power C states. "acpicpu(4) uses ACPI C-state information to reduce power consumption of idle CPUs. " http://www.openbsd.org/58.html http://www.openbsd.org/58.html
- nils-m-holm 11y agoThat's great to hear! I'll definitely give it a try! What C states does it currently support? My FreeBSD box spends most of its time in C8.
- mfincham 11y agoAs I understand previously only C1 was used. The range has been expanded now though you'd have to read the code to see exactly what it's doing. It seems to produce acceptable power draw figures on a ThinkPad X250 in any case.
- autoreleasepool 11y agoI've never tried OpenBSD, but it seems to have better laptop/desktop support. Maybe I'll fire up an instance in a VM tonight and play around a bit. Is there anything significantly different right off the bat from someone coming from the FreeBSD world?
- frenkel 11y agoOnly binary patches for base provided by a third party (M:Tier, where a number of OpenBSD developers work).
- fnordo 11y agoI haven't run FBSD in years so I can't comment but I highly recommend OBSD for laptops (obviously with supported hardware).
- niels_olson 11y agoI set up an OBSD laptop, an ancient Dell Inspiron 8000. Based on the experience, I'd like to get a lightweight, cheap, relatively modern laptop. Any recommendations? Cheapest thinkpad I can find?
- DanBC 11y ago> UEFI boot support means systems that lack BIOS compat will work now. > ASUS X205TA is an example of a machine with reduced hardware ACPI. Also has Broadcom wifi. I don’t know of a particularly good choice in the netbook category. The ASUS X205TA is a machine that is hostile to anything not Windows. It doesn't have bios. It has 64 bit architecture, but a 32 bit EFI. That makes it harder ot install for example some Linuxes. Here's a 51 page thread in the Ubuntu forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2254322&page=51 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2254322&page=51 Here's someone trying to write a driver for sound: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.alsa.devel/138822 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.alsa.devel/138822 Here's the guide to getting debian on it: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/X205TA https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/X205TA Here's the (as usual, excellent) guide to getting Arch on it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Asus_x205ta https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Asus_x205ta I guess people using BSD are happy with installs that are more complex than "burn an image to a USB stick; boot from that USB stick; click a button". But here's an example of someone installing Arch: http://ifranali.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/installing-arch-linux-on-asus-x205ta.html http://ifranali.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/installing-arch-linux... It's a shame it's so hostile because, considering the price, it's a nice enough machine. (The screen is lousy, and the sound is odd. If you liked the EEE PC 701, well, this isn't as good.)
- brynet 11y agoOpenBSD doesn't use GRUB. OpenBSD's EFI loader is a port of the existing second-stage loader, boot(8). It can load both i386 and amd64 kernels, and there are EFI binaries for 64-bit and 32-bit firmware.
- echochar 11y ago"I guess people using BSD... burn an image to a USB stick..." I always thought "burn" referred to optical storage like CD-ROM? Not sure about others, but when I do BSD installs I do not have to click any buttons. I do not need a mouse. I can lazily use something as small as an 8M stick for the install image. It couldn't be much easier. With the size of today's RAM (500M+), using the install image I can make the custom image with my personal kernel configs, utilities, and settings entirely in memory without needing to write anything to a HDD. Then I just dd the image to the removable media. That is the slowest step. My custom images are quite small too, under 16M, and need no access to a HDD. The system runs just fine in RAM, no swap. I guess I could do the same setup with "Arch" but I imagine it would take considerable work undoing pre-configurations based on assumptions about how I would want my system configured. Easier perhaps to just compile my own custom Linux kernel and "initrd". Build from the ground up. I like the flexibility and control with BSD. Not to say Linux does not have flexibility and control, too. It certainly does. I just rarely see ordinary Linux users making use of it when installing. Instead many if not all decisions have already been made, and everything is pre-configured. "One click..." Kudos to the OpenBSD folks for the network drivers.
- jsherer 11y ago> There are a few minor quirks, but generally it works well > As ever, support for Broadcom wifi and Nvidia graphics is nonexistent. This is exactly the big issue with adoption of any *nix system on laptop or desktop. No user wants to have to live with quirks. Users just want their system to work.
- sdegutis 11y ago- This mid-2013 Mac Pro wakes up every few hours at night, even though I have disabled every "wake from sleep" setting that exists in OS X - My mid-2013 MBP has, several times this week, turned on while closed, and continued as if it was opened (playing YouTube videos or whatever else it be doing), only shutting back off after about 120 seconds or so - Every time I turn this Mac Pro on, it doesn't recognize the wired Apple keyboard that's plugged into the Apple Cinema Display, and says it's looking for a bluetooth keyboard, until I unplug and replug the keyboard in at least 3 or 4 times - My MBP once emitted a (very) loud buzzing sound from its speakers, for absolutely no reason, that lasted about 3 or 4 seconds, startling everyone nearby, when no sound-based programs were running - My wife's Surface Pro 3 continually needs to be restarted because touch-screen controls simply stop being able to open programs on the home/grid page. - If our family ASUS $800 computer is left on and falls asleep, it won't wake up, and will need to be manually shut down and restarted These are just off the top of my head. Point is, Microsoft/Apple reliability is a complete myth. I'm tired of it and I'm tired of throwing extra money away for the sake of "higher reliability" and "fewer quirks".
- i80and 11y agoTHANK you! I'm tired of the cult of perfection surrounding frankly middling proprietary operating systems. - Every mac I've ever used has had Launchpad UI bugs requiring me to try several times to launch things. - OS X has woeful graphics drivers, to the point where Mesa is doing better. - My Air got erratically unusably laggy until I finally gave up on it. - My MBP will occasionally forget that it has any integrated input devices, requiring me to either find a USB keyboard or reboot. - Microsoft still hasn't resolved their graphics driver stability situation; blue screens are far from a relic of the past in my experience. These are anecdotes, yes. Sure, some (rare) people might have a perfect experience with OS X or Windows. But the point is, free operating systems don't have a monopoly on driver and spitshine issues.
- mfincham 11y agoCan confirm that snapshots from December run almost flawlessly already on an X250. Great work OpenBSD team and roll on 5.9.
- plg 11y agowhat is the "almost"?
- mfincham 11y agoThe devs advise that there are still some problems with suspend / resume while 3D acceleration is in use. I imagine this should be fixed before 5.9 is released. I also didn't run in to this bug. Edit: Also didn't test Bluetooth or WWAN.
- codesci 11y agoAFAIK there is no Bluetooth support since 5.6, they dropped the entire subsystem. Found that out when I wanted to use a wireless mouse with my Macbook Air... other than that and the embedded WiFi it works fine, they've done a great job.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- totally 11y agoDo they still exclude all 3rd party binaries?
- brynet 11y agoWhat 3rd party binaries? You mean the ~9000 packages?
- jlgaddis 11y agoblobs? Yes.
- ams6110 11y agoYes. This is why no support for Nvidia or Broadcom.
- Maken 11y agoDon't they ship the free Nvidia Mesa driver either?
- wooger 11y agoFrom the base system, they exclude any proprietary code & binary blobs. There are many 3rd party packages in ports.
- adamzegelin 11y ago> There’s also some very preliminary support for HID over IIC, for systems that attach keyboards and touchpads over an I2C bus. Keyboards & trackpads over I2C? I liked the trend of moving everything to USB, even for internal devices.
- anonymfus 11y agoHID over I2C specification was created by Microsoft for external devices connectable to their Surface tablets. IIRC they claimed that it saved power because of usage of simpler controllers.
- amluto 11y agoRegardless of what it was intended for, my Skylake laptop has its touchpad set up using HID over I2C. It works on legacy systems using some kind of PS/2 emulation, but it works much better using I2C.
- Sanddancer 11y agoEverything old is new again. One of the original intents of I2C was just that -- a universal bus for semi-low speed devices, including keyboards. USB just happened to come around at the same time and defined a physical spec along with an protocol, and the battle was done, with I2C relegated to embedded devices and things like querying monitors for supported features/modes.
- teacup50 11y agoWhy? USB adds tons of complexity/overhead relative to what HID devices actually need -- especially hardwired devices.
- SixSigma 11y agoUSB - not Universal, not Serial and not a Bus
- Sanddancer 11y agoUSB isn't the right choice for a lot of interconnects, or even most interconnects, especially things like HID for mobile devices. One of the big advantages you can have with I2C is that because it's multi-master, both sides of the HID chain can become a lot simpler. The host side doesn't need to send occasional messages asking if the various HID devices have data, and the device side doesn't need the more complicated logic to handle USB HID events. Instead, the HID device can send HID events as they happen, and the host only needs to send the much less common host communications -- for commands like turning on and off lights, etc -- when those happens. This means a bit deeper sleep, and as such, less power consumption.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kingmanaz 11y agoUp and running on a 366Mhz Pentium II based Dell CPi. Using w3m-image through FVWM for browsing.
- nemesisrobot 11y agoAlmost all laptops these days come with SSDs and last I checked, OpenBSD doesn't support TRIM. Has this been fixed? Is lack of TRIM a non-issue?
- bcook 11y agoI thought SSDs were integrating TRIM into the drive's firmware/controller nowadays.
- ultramancool 11y agoThat's impossible (AFAIK at least) - the drives can't know what parts of the filesystem are in use, only the OS can.
- bcook 11y agoA quick Googling shows it exists only in high-end SSDs, but the information is from 2013. Just anecdotally, my Nexus 9 does not even have the fstrim command anymore, nor do I see any discard options in the fstab. My Nexus 7 2012 had lots of interest about fstrim improving performance, but not my Nexus 9. I assumed the TRIM issue had disappeared.
- mondoshawan 11y agoUhh... The nexus 7 and 9? You realize those have SD and MMC cards soldered to the motherboards and work /entirely/ unlike an SSD, right? Also, the OP is right: TRIM works by telling the SSD which blocks that were previously used are now unused, so that the SSD, at a lower level, can eventually erase the larger flash sector. There is literally no way for the SSD to know this intrinsically because SSDs do not expose a filesystem interface.
- bcook 11y agoRegardless of the differences, the Nexus 7 used trim (introduced in Android 4.3) on it's flash-based (SSD also uses flash) solid-state memory and my Nexus 9 does not. The trim "bug" is well known for some Android devices, but now it has died off. I was attempting to guess why. Another quick Googling seems to say improved garbage collection (in the SSD itself) has lessened the need for fstrim. Hopefully someone who is knowledgeable will chime in.
- voltagex_ 11y ago>Lots of fixes to USB and and xhci mean USB 3 devices should attach much more reliably. Does anyone know how much code FreeBSD and OpenBSD share? FreeNAS uses FreeBSD 9 and the forum is allergic to any mention of xhci. I've got it working on a Atom C2758 system but it runs at USB 2 speed.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y agoIIRC, they both forked the USB stack from NetBSD a long time ago and haven't really remained in sync since. The XHCI drivers seem to be independent implementations.
- voltagex_ 11y agoDamnit. Looks like I'll be trialling FreeBSD 10 and OpenBSD 5. If I had a good alternative to ZFS I'd jump back to Linux before loading too much data on to this NAS. FreeNAS 9 is like going back to the 90s.
- castell 11y agoSpeaking about NetBSD. I never see any news about NetBSD and hardly any about FreeBSD. Though quite a few about OpenBSD. Why?
- freebasedgirl 11y agoWe borrow a lot, however Freebsd tends to like to do things as library layers. e.g. libgraph, and other things we don't do.
- freebasedgirl 11y ago5.9 is going to be amazing. I've been running current and with the patches from Bitrig's port of Netbsd features, we now have a working dtrace/zfs. No more fsck! Dtrace lacks the pledge(2) probes, but hope that gets fixed soon. Otherwise it's nice to have alternatives to desktop linux. Only miss Spotify. oh well.
- throwaway2048 11y agoNetBSD ZFS has rather severe bugs, was this addressed by bitrig? They have remained unfixed in NetBSD for quite some years now. Known Bugs vnode reclaiming deadlocks vnode fsync bug kmem_cache_alloc/ aka pool_cache_get panics https://wiki.netbsd.org/users/haad/porting_zfs/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/users/haad/porting_zfs/ Should also be noted that dtrace and zfs can never be actually integrated into OpenBSD due to them refusing to import CDDL licensed code.
- freebasedgirl 11y agoLast edited 3 years and 9 months ago That sounds authoritative. The CDDL is an anti forking license. It requires spooning.
- Bluerise 11y agoBitrig does not have support for ZFS. Must be something different from Bitrig the poster is talking about.
- TurboHaskal 11y agoIs there any reason not to run -current?
- freebasedgirl 11y agoWhy sit around six months out of date? Packages stop getting updated. With current that's not an issue.
- Bluerise 11y ago
- scriptdevil 11y agoI loved running OpenBSD on my laptop. The man-pages were insanely good and the *ctl commands to configure stuff were refreshingly well organized - no more mucking around with a 100 different config files. My major gripe last time was that Firefox was unusably slow. I was told that this was because multi-threading support in OpenBSD was poor. Also, while chromium was tolerable, playing something on youtube would make it feel like the system was under a lot of load. I finally had to move away from it because of this. That said, I plan to move to Vultr and run an OpenBSD box when my current Digital Ocean account runs out of balance.
- bluedino 11y agoDoes anyone else just run Linux (or OS X if you're on a MacBook) and then just run OpenBSD in a VM? Run it fullscreen and can't even tell. You get all the advantages of OpenBSD plus all the advantages of using the regular host OS.