9 ms·

OpenBSD and the modern laptop

157 points by protomyth 9y ago

djsumdog 9y ago
I really wanted to put OpenBSD on this old X1 Carbon 1st gen I had. I had trouble getting the installation with full-disk encryption working. The peeps in #openbsd/freenode were amazingly helpful, but after a lot of debugging we came down to "Is your hardware working correctly? Have you tried to install anything else?" I ended up putting FreeBSD on it and it worked great for a while. Then came the reboots, the lockups ... turns out I really should have run memtest86 first. The memory was bad; probably several other things too. I purchased it from a dodgy used shop and didn't realize all of this until past the 30 days. The memory on those models are soldered in too. I ended up eBaying it as a parts laptop. Supposedly a fully functional X1 1st gen runs OpenBSD great. :-P
- saghm 9y ago
  I struggled a while back trying to get FDE on an OpenBSD install, and I think I did eventually get it working, although it took a good amount of time and effort. For comparison, back when I installed Arch with FDE for the first time, I found the documentation to be more than sufficient for getting it working relatively easily. Given OpenBSD's emphasis on security and the fact that the installer already can autopartition the hard drive its installing to, it would be awesome if the installer supported FDE in the installation without needing to manually deal with all the disk commands.
jancsika 9y ago
> and then it takes a bit of demonstrating that yes, the graphics runs with the best available resolution the hardware can offer, the wireless network is functional, suspend and resume does work, and so forth. But then from the Gist the author linked wrt getting X working with HiDPI: > I'm using X in full resolution of 2560x1440 with wsfb (backed by efifb(4)). I configured my X session for HiDPI (retina), so I had to calculate and set DisplaySize in xorg.conf to get the correct DPI. With my configuration below, most but not all fonts display correctly. A few widgets still have tiny fonts. And later in that same Gist: > I'm using Window Maker (since about 1997). It doesn't fully support HiDPI but it is possible to make it useable by tweaking the fonts. Some widgets are still tiny but window titles, menus etc. work fine. So to fill in what comes after the ellipses for the typical respondent of news of a laptop running OpenBSD: "Really? But... wouldn't that require special trips to the internet to copy/paste configuration settings that still only partially solve the problem of a laptop running an OS that wasn't designed to run on a laptop?" And the answer seems to be: yes. One more bullet point from that Gist: > In /etc/sysctl.conf I have to disable suspend when the lid is closed: machdep.lidsuspend=0 But the blog author says suspend/resume does indeed work. Is the blog author manually suspending/resuming, or did he get it to trigger correctly when the lid is open/closed?
- boomboomsubban 9y ago
  >So to fill in what comes after the ellipses for the typical respondent of news of a laptop running OpenBSD: "Really? But... wouldn't that require special trips to the internet to copy/paste configuration settings that still only partially solve the problem of a laptop running an OS that wasn't designed to run on a laptop?" And the answer seems to be: yes These problems seem related to the choice of WindowMaker, not OpenBSD. Choosing a different window manager or desktop environment won't have the same issues. And ACPI events vary wildly, unless the two people are using the exact same model I wouldn't be surprised if their suspend/resume success is different.
  - nerflad 9y ago
    I noticed this with my new XPS laptop last year. After moving to GNOME, things started Just Working. A lot of what we consider basic functionality is implemented differently by each DE, and running in userspace, or is completely absent (like power management or automatic/easy wireless networking).
    - SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
      In my experience HiDPI is pretty well supported in Linux these days but mixed DPI over multiple monitors is still somewhat hit-and-miss. I've resorted to running my XPS 15's built-in screen at 1080P when I have my 1080P external monitors connected. Shame as I did pay extra for the 4K option! Independent scaling per monitor is supposedly supported in Wayland and just around the corner in KDE so I live in hope. I hear it's mostly working in the very latest versions of Gnome now at least, although I couldn't get it to work. (I appreciate that this is a thread about BSD - I'm just pointing out that the situation in Linux isn't much better)
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - paulie_a 9y ago
      I generally agree and also have an XPS but one extremely annoying thing is switching the screen scaling. I usually am using external monitors but if I want to use the built-in screen I have to change a few settings and restart half my applications.
ac29 9y ago
OpenBSD's WiFi support is still the deal breaker keeping me from trying it out. Per iwm's documentation [0], 802.11n only partially works (no 40MHz channels, and limited to 1x1), and 802.11ac doesnt work at all. That means a max link rate of 72Mbps, and a real world speed of maybe half that. [0] https://man.openbsd.org/iwm https://man.openbsd.org/iwm
- mrmondo 9y ago
  Yes likewise, I’d be annoyed if AC1300 / 80Mhz didn’t work so lack of 40Mhz is a big no no for me.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tjoff 9y ago
  That is plenty fast, for practical use the only parameters worth discussing when it comes to wifi is connection stability and range.
  - pedrocr 9y ago
    I can saturate my 100Mb/s internet connection on Wifi so you'd be missing out on 2/3 of the speed there. It's useful for backups to be able to do even more than that as the local network is even faster. But you can probably get away with just ~30Mbps for most uses.
    - floatboth 9y ago
      Yeah, I have FreeBSD on my laptop with iwm(4) also. 11a speeds are enough for the usual web surfing and stuff. When I need the speed (system upgrades mostly) I just plug in the cable. I have link aggregation set up with wifi and ethernet so the handover is seamless.
      - knorker 9y ago
        I'm very happy with my decision to not provide wired network all over my house after I moved. Good Wifi is really nice in that it decouples speed from location. Even with 802.11ad (that I don't have) there's a huge difference between having to plug in when you reach a "fast area" and not having to.
ebcode 9y ago
Just installed OpenBSD 6.1 on an old Lenovo Thinkpad T500, and everything works. Suspend/Resume when closed/opened, Intel wireless card, wired ethernet port, sound, trackpad, function keys for adjusting screen brightness, all work. Well, the fingerprint reader won't work, actually, but that's about it. Would definitely recommend this setup for folks not needing anything fancy (not for gaming/3d apps), but for your average web developer, it'll do the trick. The caveat is that a T500 isn't exactly "modern" (c. 2006), but it's got a Core 2 Duo @ 2Ghz and 8G of ram, which is plenty for my admittedly modest needs.
- dijit 9y ago
  Echo this; I was using an X201s with a bunch of OS's Linux has the mess of NetworkManager FreeBSD idled hard and also has wifi-supplicant and crap. Solaris is a dead end and you can forget wifi. OpenBSD was perfect, it felt so cleanly engineered with wifi/wpa handled by ifconfig. the only concern was the bluetooth- they do not support, in any form, bluetooth. Because: "We have never seen a clean implementation of bluetooth". And yes, they trail with wifi support, but on a 7 year old laptop, that's fine. Did wonders for my battery life too.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    I avoid NM for reasons, archlinux netctl and/or systemd networkd is good enough.
  - floatboth 9y ago
    > wifi-supplicant and crap What's wrong with wpa_supplicant? It works really well, you just write one config file with all the networks and you can set the networks' priorities…
    - dijit 9y ago
      Much easier to just: ifconfig wlan0 scan ifconfig wlan0 ssid "thingIfound" wpakey "password" up dhclient wlan0
qplex 9y ago
Why is there a dedicated 10GB partition for /usr/X11R6?
- jeromenerf 9y ago
  Here are some hints from the FAQ : https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Partitioning https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Partitioning Unlike some other operating systems, OpenBSD encourages users to split their disk into a number of partitions, rather than just one or two large ones. Some of the reasons for doing so are: Security: Some of OpenBSD's default security features rely on filesystem mount(8) options such as nosuid, nodev, noexec or wxallowed. Stability: A user or a misbehaved program can fill a filesystem with garbage if they have write permissions for it. Your critical programs, which hopefully run on a different filesystem, do not get interrupted. Integrity: If one filesystem is corrupted for some reason, then your other filesystems are most likely still OK. fsck(8): You can mount partitions that you never or rarely need to write to as readonly most of the time, which will eliminate the need for a filesystem check after a crash or power interruption. Edit: verbatim format
  - floatboth 9y ago
    That's fine with soft partitions like ZFS datasets, HAMMER pseudofilesystems or btrfs subvolumes. But OpenBSD doesn't have anything like that. The pain of "my /usr is not big enough and it's a hard disklabel partition with a completely separate filesystem omg how do I resize it" makes the partitioning sooooo not worth it.
    - Gracana 9y ago
      This is not really an issue in practice, it just requires you to consider what you'll use the system for.
      - majewsky 9y ago
        That's assuming that the answer to this question is constant. I'm frequently running into the problem of / being too small on my notebook (I only have /, /home and /boot partitions) since I didn't anticipate my 2017 needs when installing the system in 2012. I really need to set aside some time to reinstall it...
ianai 9y ago
After reading this, I want to do it.
- andai 9y ago
  After reading this, I am wondering why anyone would want to do that!
rbanffy 9y ago
> Apparently heavy users of other free operating systems do not always run them on their primary workstations. Yeah right... Some strange demographics in there...
onli 9y ago
Do the BSDs support undervolting? Linux has Linux-PHC, but it seems to be broken, and in general the modern kernel does not play well with the old thinkpad I want to run this on. Did find nothing online, maybe someone here knows more?
- floatboth 9y ago
  FreeBSD has powerd, it works with P-states. You can also write to MSRs with cpucontrol(8), I think CPUs use that to adjust clock and voltage from the OS.
  - onli 9y ago
    Under Linux, P-states are for Intel Core processors I think, but I do mean older than that. Pentium M. Maybe that's just not the case under BSD, or a mixup in terminology. cpucontrol could work here (but wow, that's raw). There seems to have been efforts to support it on other BSDs, https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2007/04/14/0003.html https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2007/04/14/0003.html and http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-est/ http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-est/ mentions the voltage (but it does not seem to be configurable, and if I got it right, this later became powerd). From what I could gather one could use cpucontrol to change the stored voltages and then let powerd, powerd++ or however OpenBSD handles this do its work. Thanks for that. But it looks like no one ever tried and reported on this. Hm.
keithpeter 9y ago
What is the best work around for graphical mounting/unmounting of a USB stick in version 6.1 and after? I'm using a doas line and the xfce-mount panel plug-in. [Background: mounting/unmounting by non-root users was removed in 6.0(?) for security reasons and the toad daemon/hotplug solution became apparently unavailable) PS: OpenBSD 6.1 on an older thinkpad (X200) just works fine with xfce4
brynet 9y ago
I'm running OpenBSD on a Skylake-gen ThinkPad E560. There was support recently added for Skylake graphics to -current snapshots, nvme(4) is quickly replacing SATA on newer machines and is ready for 6.2. If you have a spare laptop, follow pitrh and give installing OpenBSD a shot. https://twitter.com/canadianbryan/status/867484974953508867 https://twitter.com/canadianbryan/status/867484974953508867
- equalunique 9y ago
  Interesting! Glad you are having a positive experience. Is your E560 using Intel graphics or AMD? I believe these models come with both.
  - brynet 9y ago
    Intel.
ivanbakel 9y ago
>root is a real user Is this uncommon enough to need specifying? I've heard something along the lines of Ubuntu having no actual root user for security reasons, but I got no impression that this was a common approach. If root isn't a real user, what are your options when your main user is compromised?
- hedora 9y ago
  It is considered poor practice on Linux to set a password for the root account. This is not the case on OpenBSD. You can usually login by editing the grub kernel command line, and setting init=/bin/sh Disk encryption may or may not make account recovery more complicated.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    F if i know where this idea came from, though i guess it may be an OSX import...

157 points by protomyth 9y ago

I really wanted to put OpenBSD on this old X1 Carbon 1st gen I had. I had trouble getting the installation with full-disk encryption working. The peeps in #openbsd/freenode were amazingly helpful, but after a lot of debugging we came down to "Is your hardware working correctly? Have you tried to install anything else?" I ended up putting FreeBSD on it and it worked great for a while. Then came the reboots, the lockups ... turns out I really should have run memtest86 first. The memory was bad; probably several other things too. I purchased it from a dodgy used shop and didn't realize all of this until past the 30 days. The memory on those models are soldered in too. I ended up eBaying it as a parts laptop. Supposedly a fully functional X1 1st gen runs OpenBSD great. :-P

saghm 9y ago
I struggled a while back trying to get FDE on an OpenBSD install, and I think I did eventually get it working, although it took a good amount of time and effort. For comparison, back when I installed Arch with FDE for the first time, I found the documentation to be more than sufficient for getting it working relatively easily. Given OpenBSD's emphasis on security and the fact that the installer already can autopartition the hard drive its installing to, it would be awesome if the installer supported FDE in the installation without needing to manually deal with all the disk commands.

jancsika 9y ago

> and then it takes a bit of demonstrating that yes, the graphics runs with the best available resolution the hardware can offer, the wireless network is functional, suspend and resume does work, and so forth. But then from the Gist the author linked wrt getting X working with HiDPI: > I'm using X in full resolution of 2560x1440 with wsfb (backed by efifb(4)). I configured my X session for HiDPI (retina), so I had to calculate and set DisplaySize in xorg.conf to get the correct DPI. With my configuration below, most but not all fonts display correctly. A few widgets still have tiny fonts. And later in that same Gist: > I'm using Window Maker (since about 1997). It doesn't fully support HiDPI but it is possible to make it useable by tweaking the fonts. Some widgets are still tiny but window titles, menus etc. work fine. So to fill in what comes after the ellipses for the typical respondent of news of a laptop running OpenBSD: "Really? But... wouldn't that require special trips to the internet to copy/paste configuration settings that still only partially solve the problem of a laptop running an OS that wasn't designed to run on a laptop?" And the answer seems to be: yes. One more bullet point from that Gist: > In /etc/sysctl.conf I have to disable suspend when the lid is closed: machdep.lidsuspend=0 But the blog author says suspend/resume does indeed work. Is the blog author manually suspending/resuming, or did he get it to trigger correctly when the lid is open/closed?

boomboomsubban 9y ago
>So to fill in what comes after the ellipses for the typical respondent of news of a laptop running OpenBSD: "Really? But... wouldn't that require special trips to the internet to copy/paste configuration settings that still only partially solve the problem of a laptop running an OS that wasn't designed to run on a laptop?" And the answer seems to be: yes These problems seem related to the choice of WindowMaker, not OpenBSD. Choosing a different window manager or desktop environment won't have the same issues. And ACPI events vary wildly, unless the two people are using the exact same model I wouldn't be surprised if their suspend/resume success is different.
- nerflad 9y ago
  I noticed this with my new XPS laptop last year. After moving to GNOME, things started Just Working. A lot of what we consider basic functionality is implemented differently by each DE, and running in userspace, or is completely absent (like power management or automatic/easy wireless networking).
  - SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
    In my experience HiDPI is pretty well supported in Linux these days but mixed DPI over multiple monitors is still somewhat hit-and-miss. I've resorted to running my XPS 15's built-in screen at 1080P when I have my 1080P external monitors connected. Shame as I did pay extra for the 4K option! Independent scaling per monitor is supposedly supported in Wayland and just around the corner in KDE so I live in hope. I hear it's mostly working in the very latest versions of Gnome now at least, although I couldn't get it to work. (I appreciate that this is a thread about BSD - I'm just pointing out that the situation in Linux isn't much better)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - paulie_a 9y ago
    I generally agree and also have an XPS but one extremely annoying thing is switching the screen scaling. I usually am using external monitors but if I want to use the built-in screen I have to change a few settings and restart half my applications.

ac29 9y ago

OpenBSD's WiFi support is still the deal breaker keeping me from trying it out. Per iwm's documentation [0], 802.11n only partially works (no 40MHz channels, and limited to 1x1), and 802.11ac doesnt work at all. That means a max link rate of 72Mbps, and a real world speed of maybe half that. [0] https://man.openbsd.org/iwm https://man.openbsd.org/iwm

mrmondo 9y ago
Yes likewise, I’d be annoyed if AC1300 / 80Mhz didn’t work so lack of 40Mhz is a big no no for me.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tjoff 9y ago
That is plenty fast, for practical use the only parameters worth discussing when it comes to wifi is connection stability and range.
- pedrocr 9y ago
  I can saturate my 100Mb/s internet connection on Wifi so you'd be missing out on 2/3 of the speed there. It's useful for backups to be able to do even more than that as the local network is even faster. But you can probably get away with just ~30Mbps for most uses.
  - floatboth 9y ago
    Yeah, I have FreeBSD on my laptop with iwm(4) also. 11a speeds are enough for the usual web surfing and stuff. When I need the speed (system upgrades mostly) I just plug in the cable. I have link aggregation set up with wifi and ethernet so the handover is seamless.
    - knorker 9y ago
      I'm very happy with my decision to not provide wired network all over my house after I moved. Good Wifi is really nice in that it decouples speed from location. Even with 802.11ad (that I don't have) there's a huge difference between having to plug in when you reach a "fast area" and not having to.

ebcode 9y ago

Just installed OpenBSD 6.1 on an old Lenovo Thinkpad T500, and everything works. Suspend/Resume when closed/opened, Intel wireless card, wired ethernet port, sound, trackpad, function keys for adjusting screen brightness, all work. Well, the fingerprint reader won't work, actually, but that's about it. Would definitely recommend this setup for folks not needing anything fancy (not for gaming/3d apps), but for your average web developer, it'll do the trick. The caveat is that a T500 isn't exactly "modern" (c. 2006), but it's got a Core 2 Duo @ 2Ghz and 8G of ram, which is plenty for my admittedly modest needs.

dijit 9y ago
Echo this; I was using an X201s with a bunch of OS's Linux has the mess of NetworkManager FreeBSD idled hard and also has wifi-supplicant and crap. Solaris is a dead end and you can forget wifi. OpenBSD was perfect, it felt so cleanly engineered with wifi/wpa handled by ifconfig. the only concern was the bluetooth- they do not support, in any form, bluetooth. Because: "We have never seen a clean implementation of bluetooth". And yes, they trail with wifi support, but on a 7 year old laptop, that's fine. Did wonders for my battery life too.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  I avoid NM for reasons, archlinux netctl and/or systemd networkd is good enough.
- floatboth 9y ago
  > wifi-supplicant and crap What's wrong with wpa_supplicant? It works really well, you just write one config file with all the networks and you can set the networks' priorities…
  - dijit 9y ago
    Much easier to just: ifconfig wlan0 scan ifconfig wlan0 ssid "thingIfound" wpakey "password" up dhclient wlan0

qplex 9y ago

Why is there a dedicated 10GB partition for /usr/X11R6?

jeromenerf 9y ago
Here are some hints from the FAQ : https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Partitioning https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Partitioning Unlike some other operating systems, OpenBSD encourages users to split their disk into a number of partitions, rather than just one or two large ones. Some of the reasons for doing so are: Security: Some of OpenBSD's default security features rely on filesystem mount(8) options such as nosuid, nodev, noexec or wxallowed. Stability: A user or a misbehaved program can fill a filesystem with garbage if they have write permissions for it. Your critical programs, which hopefully run on a different filesystem, do not get interrupted. Integrity: If one filesystem is corrupted for some reason, then your other filesystems are most likely still OK. fsck(8): You can mount partitions that you never or rarely need to write to as readonly most of the time, which will eliminate the need for a filesystem check after a crash or power interruption. Edit: verbatim format
- floatboth 9y ago
  That's fine with soft partitions like ZFS datasets, HAMMER pseudofilesystems or btrfs subvolumes. But OpenBSD doesn't have anything like that. The pain of "my /usr is not big enough and it's a hard disklabel partition with a completely separate filesystem omg how do I resize it" makes the partitioning sooooo not worth it.
  - Gracana 9y ago
    This is not really an issue in practice, it just requires you to consider what you'll use the system for.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      That's assuming that the answer to this question is constant. I'm frequently running into the problem of / being too small on my notebook (I only have /, /home and /boot partitions) since I didn't anticipate my 2017 needs when installing the system in 2012. I really need to set aside some time to reinstall it...

ianai 9y ago

After reading this, I want to do it.

andai 9y ago
After reading this, I am wondering why anyone would want to do that!

rbanffy 9y ago

> Apparently heavy users of other free operating systems do not always run them on their primary workstations. Yeah right... Some strange demographics in there...

onli 9y ago

Do the BSDs support undervolting? Linux has Linux-PHC, but it seems to be broken, and in general the modern kernel does not play well with the old thinkpad I want to run this on. Did find nothing online, maybe someone here knows more?

floatboth 9y ago
FreeBSD has powerd, it works with P-states. You can also write to MSRs with cpucontrol(8), I think CPUs use that to adjust clock and voltage from the OS.
- onli 9y ago
  Under Linux, P-states are for Intel Core processors I think, but I do mean older than that. Pentium M. Maybe that's just not the case under BSD, or a mixup in terminology. cpucontrol could work here (but wow, that's raw). There seems to have been efforts to support it on other BSDs, https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2007/04/14/0003.html https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2007/04/14/0003.html and http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-est/ http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-est/ mentions the voltage (but it does not seem to be configurable, and if I got it right, this later became powerd). From what I could gather one could use cpucontrol to change the stored voltages and then let powerd, powerd++ or however OpenBSD handles this do its work. Thanks for that. But it looks like no one ever tried and reported on this. Hm.

keithpeter 9y ago

What is the best work around for graphical mounting/unmounting of a USB stick in version 6.1 and after? I'm using a doas line and the xfce-mount panel plug-in. [Background: mounting/unmounting by non-root users was removed in 6.0(?) for security reasons and the toad daemon/hotplug solution became apparently unavailable) PS: OpenBSD 6.1 on an older thinkpad (X200) just works fine with xfce4

brynet 9y ago

I'm running OpenBSD on a Skylake-gen ThinkPad E560. There was support recently added for Skylake graphics to -current snapshots, nvme(4) is quickly replacing SATA on newer machines and is ready for 6.2. If you have a spare laptop, follow pitrh and give installing OpenBSD a shot. https://twitter.com/canadianbryan/status/867484974953508867 https://twitter.com/canadianbryan/status/867484974953508867

equalunique 9y ago
Interesting! Glad you are having a positive experience. Is your E560 using Intel graphics or AMD? I believe these models come with both.
- brynet 9y ago
  Intel.

ivanbakel 9y ago

>root is a real user Is this uncommon enough to need specifying? I've heard something along the lines of Ubuntu having no actual root user for security reasons, but I got no impression that this was a common approach. If root isn't a real user, what are your options when your main user is compromised?

hedora 9y ago
It is considered poor practice on Linux to set a password for the root account. This is not the case on OpenBSD. You can usually login by editing the grub kernel command line, and setting init=/bin/sh Disk encryption may or may not make account recovery more complicated.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  F if i know where this idea came from, though i guess it may be an OSX import...