How can I improve the performance of OpenBSD?
from hellfire103@lemmy.ca to bsd@lemmy.sdf.org on 27 Jul 11:04
https://lemmy.ca/post/48703604

So, I installed OpenBSD on my ThinkPad T400 a few weeks ago. It was going okay, but then a job came up that required Windows.

I do not run Windows on any of my devices due to a galaxy of reasons, but i keep an old hard drive handy with Tiny10 that I can shove into a laptop when needed (a rare occurrence).

Anyway, I noticed that somehow, Tiny10 actually ran considerably better than OpenBSD on this particular machine, despite also using a hard drive rather than an SSD.

My OpenBSD setup uses bspwm, and my RAM usage is normally quite low unless vimb is open.

Is there any way i could increase the performance of OpenBSD on my ThinkPad?

Specifications

* CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 * GPU : Intel Mobile 4 Series Chipset * RAM: ~8GB * Disk: 240GB SATA SSD

#bsd

threaded - newest

hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org on 27 Jul 16:17 next collapse

maybe hyperthreading is disabled on openbsd? or meltdown/spectre mitigation not applied to old tiny10?

Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip on 27 Jul 17:24 collapse

No hyperthreading on that proc :/.

vermaden@lemmy.ml on 27 Jul 21:06 next collapse

Is there any way i could increase the performance of OpenBSD on my ThinkPad?

That ThinkPad T400 is REALLY old and OpenBSD is known to be slow - so if you connect slow hardware with slow OS … you get what You get.

IMHO update to at least to T420/T430 … or change OpenBSD to NetBSD or FreeBSD.

stsp on 28 Jul 07:31 collapse

Meltdown mitigations significantly slowed down core duo era machines such as T400/X200 thinkpads. Try running it on a post-meltdown Intel CPU or a post-spectre AMD CPU to see the difference.

hellfire103@lemmy.ca on 28 Jul 09:53 collapse

I’m afraid I only have two such devices. One is my daily driver, which cannot run BSD due to software compatibility. The other cannot run BSD due to its unsupported WiFi chipset.