OpenBSD Gains Centrino Power Management

In a recent email, Theo de Raadt announced support in -current for power management on the Pentium M series of processors. This allows the CPU to be throttled and therefore power saved. Additionally, dhclient was modified so that it is not necessary to find the process of the already-running dhclient and kill it before running dhclient again. This is useful for laptops that spend time roaming between different wireless networks, when dhclient is used fairly often.

Before anyone comments, on linux it's cpufreq

[Ayanami Rei]

And yes, it supports Centrino. [codemonkey.org.uk]

In fact, the only OS that doesn't have a native

[Ayanami Rei]

interface now seems to be Windows NT 5.x. (okay, so XP SP1 supports automatic throttling, but you can't control it)
Yawn. 3rd party software? Bleah.

If it's hibernating, it won't be any faster.

[Ayanami Rei]

But if it was just asleep, it takes about 3 or 4 seconds to be usable (that's about how long it takes to intialize the video and spin up the hard drive if necessary).

It seems about consistent for linux and windows. I imagine FreeBSD is the same; I've never used it on a laptop.

Re:OpenBSD and Laptops

[lcde]

I've run 3.2 and now 3.4 on my Compaq E500 Armada. Everything seems to be supported without any problems. I also have a Dlink DWL-650 wireless card.

Re:OpenBSD and Laptops

[Brandybuck]

Don't know about OpenBSD, but FreeBSD-5.2 runs just fine on my Compaq Presario 2591. Everything but the winmodem worked out-of-the-box. I've never used it, but the FreeBSD GEOM system supports an encrypted filesystem.

Re:If it's hibernating, it won't be any faster.

[addaon]

Yup, there are three differences between the powerbooks and (most, not all) pc laptops. First, the powerbooks are energy-star compliant, which is a goofy way of saying they draw 1W of power when suspended (on battery; they actually take about 3W when on AC, for reasons I don't quite get). This is what allows such long suspend times. Second, they don't support hibernate at all; if you're going away for vacation for a month or more, you have no choice really but to either plug in the powerbook, or shut it down; with a pc, you'd probably just hibernate it. Third, the lid switches work really damn well. There are a lot of PC's that have that, now, but it's still not consistent... the goal, just to let the pc makers know, is so that closing suspends immediately, and opening has an image on the screen before the screen is visible to the user.

Re:OpenBSD and Laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

check out [e-mail] [monkey.org]

i highly recommend IBM Thinkpads, in particular the X series (very portable). OpenBSD runs like a charm on most thinkpads -- many OpenBSD developers use thinkpads, so you know that the video card, etc will work ;)

Re:If it's hibernating, it won't be any faster.

[dvmiller]

(on battery; they actually take about 3W when on AC, for reasons I don't quite get)

It's charging the battery as well when it's on AC power.

Re:OpenBSD and Laptops

[SteelX]

Not sure if it's helpful, but I run OpenBSD on a Dell Latitude L400 (yes, it's old). Most things work, except the sound toggle buttons (I can't increase/decrease the volume via the keyboard's Fn+{F5,F6} buttons).

If all you need is XFree86, a web browser, and IMAP client, I highly recommend OpenBSD. OpenBSD is more than sufficient. You can make a really slick desktop with it, but it does take more time to set up than Linux or possibly FreeBSD. However, you'll learn heaps as you go along.

Disclosure: I'm also a Slackware user, and absolutely love tinkering with stuff and learning the internals of systems. :) That may be the reason why I don't mind all the tinkering that goes into getting a beautiful OpenBSD desktop up and running. That might put other people off, though. YMMV.