15
How can I improve the performance of OpenBSD? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by hellfire103@lemmy.ca to c/bsd@lemmy.sdf.org
5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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
top 5 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 week ago

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

[-] Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago

No hyperthreading on that proc :/.

[-] vermaden@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

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@azorius.net 1 points 1 week ago

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 1 points 1 week ago

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.

this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
15 points (100.0% liked)

Berkeley Software Distribution

511 readers
1 users here now

This community is for people to discuss and share anything BSD/Unix related.

While it's not intended to be a "unixporn" clone, screenshots of cool setup's are welcome.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
pfr@lemmy.sdf.org
jaypatelani@lemmy.ml
thedaemon@lemmy.sdf.org