Hi all, You may have seen my earlier thread in which I did a quick and dirty review of NetBSD 9.1 on a Thinkpad X250. Since 9.2 came out, I went ahead and did a clean install of that version to see how it compares. This post is basically a bit of a follow-up on the previous one. I'm keeping it separate since this is based on my experiences with 9.2. Overall, I must say the experience was certainly better on this particular machine. Version 9.2 felt stabler than its predecessor and I no longer experienced any "RIRB timeouts" on reboot (see here ). On the other hand, "better" doesn't necessarily equal "good" in this case. Although performance was better overall, it was still lagging despite applying some of the tweaks that have been suggested elsewhere on this forum. FreeBSD 13 ran faster on this system with a virtually identical setup (XFCE, firefox-esr, etc). I've also revisited OpenBSD 6.9 on this machine, with the same software/GUI setup, and it actually performs better on it than does NetBSD, much to my surprise given that OpenBSD is often said to be slow. I ended up deciding to try out 9.2 on a Thinkpad T550, which has almost identical specs to the X250 but twice as much RAM (16Gb). This is a productivity system on which I normally use Devuan as I need certain tools that I can't use on BSD. Since I had planned a fresh reinstall of Devuan Linux on that system anyway, I wanted to take some time to revisit NetBSD on the T550 out of sheer curiosity and to see how it performed there. Unfortunately, it proved to be identical to my experience on the Thinkpad X250. Despite having twice as much RAM, the system was pretty slow and I'd have Firefox crashing on me. I understand that memory management on NetBSD is different from Linux or the other BSDs, but still. I can't but conclude something is off there. By way of comparison, OpenBSD supports my Thinkpad buttons (backlight + volume control) out of the box. Touchpad two-finger scrolling + tapping works out of the box. Transferring files over the network is faster; installing packages doesn't lead to high RAM usage and having the CPU fan go crazy; firefox doesn't crash on me. It generally runs quiet. So I wanted to provide an overview here of some things I've observed, including some problems I encountered and have been unable to solve, whether on bare metal or in a virtual machine in certain cases. Hopefully this is useful to any NetBSD developers or users out there. If you know of any workarounds or solutions, please do let me know! Performance This is the main problem for me. RAM usage is uncomfortably high for me: -> when or after installing packages -> when performing file operations -> when syncing over the network -> when using Firefox, Libreoffice, etc. CPU runs rather too hot Network file transfers ( rsync , ssh / sftp , etc) are slower than I'm used to Suspend-to-RAM generally works though it's somewhat slow "wake on lid open" works nevertheless, there are issues after wake-up: 1. mouse does not work 2. wifi/network sometimes does not work if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } SOLUTION: unknown Touchpad tapping works out of the box two-finger scrolling does not work no matter what sysctl settings I try Note that this is a Synaptics touchpad. I believe having read here somewhere that it is not supported on such touchpads. On a X250 with a 12.5" screen this is a bummer because I typically use the touchpad a lot more with such a compact laptop. SOLUTION: unkown Thinkpad buttons do not work out of the box As noted, these do work on FreeBSD (mostly) and OpenBSD (perfectly). SOLUTION: unkown WORKAROUND: sudo intel_backlight 50% LibreOffice version 7 -> does not respect theme settings I've tested this under LXQT, XFCE, Fluxbox, etc. Even when I use gtk tools to select the appropriate theme or have an appropriately set up gtk3 config file, it just does not work. I only got it to work, briefly, with Libreoffice v6 which appears to rely on Linux emulation and use gtk2, and after a reboot I was back to square one. Note that I have not experienced this on either FreeBSD or OpenBSD. On those systems, libreoffice integrates the theme as it ought to. SOLUTION: unknown WORKAROUND: install v6 with linux emulation? VIM issues set termguicolors in conjunction with colorscheme mycolorscheme in ~/.vimrc are not honored in terminal windows however, it does display correctly in gvim Tested with: qterminal xfce4-terminal py39-terminator Note that I initially tested this with only vim installed. I later figured I might need to install vim-gtk3 instead so I did, but the result was the same. This works as expected under FreeBSD and OpenBSD so I don't know how to explain this. I've dug up information online since others have had similar problems under Linux but none of it helped. Works fine in gvim but not in any terminal I tried. Because of that, I didn't attempt to try any plugins like airline or vim bundle. I rely on vim for my workflow a heck of a lot so this is a pain for me. SOLUTION: unknown WORKAROUND: use gvim XFCE as pointed out before, it does not detect the battery additional cursor themes such as DMZ are not detected and unavailable in the XFCE settings after installing Papirus Icon Theme (whether through pkgin or manually), it's just impossible to change the icon of the application or whisker menu because, as it loads the available icons, the CPU starts going crazy, memory goes up, and xfce4-panel basically ends up freezing or crashing. I admit this operation is rather slow and resource-intensive for me on any system I've used (including Linux) but at least the icon selector eventually opens. Worked for me on FreeBSD and OpenBSD so I don't know why it struggles under NetBSD. As regards the battery problem, I used watch 'envstat | grep %' in a terminal to keep an eye on it. Also, as noted in my other thread, lxqt does detect the battery but also displays an icon for some internal battery that is not present in any of my (second-hand) Thinkpads. SOLUTION: currently none but @rvp is working on a patch WORKAROUND: check with 'envstat' from terminal Sound mostly works fine in 9.2 for me, so that's a good thing! nevertheless, I've noticed something weird: => when using the touchpad: - sound often hangs or has hiccups - at times it 'reverbs' - or has 'static' distortion for a while !! This does not occur when I use the mouse exclusively SOLUTION: unknown WORKAROUND: don't touch the touchpad? Virtualization issues Virtualization is one of the main reasons I have a preference for NetBSD and why it would, in theory, be a viable alternative for Linux. Since I need to use software that is only available for Windows, I rely on virtualization a lot for productivity/work. On those systems, I want an OS that is reliable, stable, secure and has good virtualization capabilities so I can avoid having to run Windows natively on one or several dedicated machines solely to be able to use a few Windows-only packages. With VirtualBox (which I avoid these days) or Qemu/KVM under Linux I can use Windows machines seamlessly. FreeBSD has seriously let me down there (but that's another story) as I discovered VirtualBox didn't function well. The other alternatives are not a good match. OpenBSD (like FreeBSD) only appears to have the "tcg" accelerator available, which won't do for me, even though these operating systems are, of course, great in other ways. NetBSD provides Qemu with nvmm and haxm . Unfortunately, I haven't managed to install a Windows VM using nvmm . It boots from the install iso then just hangs and never gets on with it. Compiling haxm from pkgsrc failed on every single attempt. I hope to try again in the time to come but I'm afraid I'm going to have to stick to Devuan for such purposes in the foreseeable future. It's just too critical to me. Conclusion In itself, none of this necessarily "disqualifies" NetBSD as an OS. I could still use it for other purposes, as a server or for strictly personal productivity that doesn't require virtualization. There is still a lot to like about it and I will keep following the project as I've done for quite some time. Yet given the above-mentioned issues, I'm afraid it's not going to do for me at this stage as a full-fledged alternative to Linux. Even for personal productivity, given those issues, it's a bit too much of a hassle. But perhaps I've overlooked something and there are solutions for these issues. So, let me know your thoughts or possible solutions. I'm still going to reinstall NetBSD after having given OpenBSD its proper dues, though I'm sticking to Linux on my work machines for the time being. Cheers! EDIT: I want to add that all of the above issues I've had on bare metal were also present (if applicable) when running NetBSD in a virtual machine

So I can't comment on everything. However, I believe the RAM thing is a misunderstanding between how other operating systems manage RAM and how NetBSD does. My understanding is the high RAM usage is because NetBSD will cache as much as possible and will only free up the RAM when a process that is running needs it. Free memory sitting around serves no value. But if you cache something, it makes it faster to reopen. So think of it this way. You open a document, edit it, save it, close the program. NetBSD will not free the memory from that task unless another program needs it. If another program doesnt need it, it wont free it. The idea is, if you open up that text editor again, the code is already cached in memory and NetBSD does not need to make a call to the disk for an I/O operating to retrieve the code segements and load it into memory. It has gotten better, but read/write from backing store compared to main memory (system memory/RAM), the main memory is gonna win everytime. However, if RAM is full, but a lot of cache and there is not sufficient RAM to open another program not already cached, NetBSD will then dump some of the cached memory in RAM to open up space for the new program. And of course, this may not apply just to programs. It can apply to files to. You open a webpage, it might cache that in RAM since the space is there and not being used for something else, so if you open that page again, it should open faster. This is similar to what your browser does with its browser cache, but on a system wide level. So while it looks like an issue. It isnt. It is just a different way of managing resources from other operating systems and a misunderstanding of how RAM operates. Eating more RAM doesnt inherently hack away at system performance unless you require to much and go into SWAP space. Then it goes back to having to make i/o calls to the hard drive which is always gonna be slower than RAM. However, enough processes in the queue waiting to be ran will cause performance issues. A lot of disk read/writes will cause performance issues as the i/o queue has a big backlog and slower read/write times.

netneo Can you post a top output so that we can see what your mem. usage looks like? About that touchpad+sound issue: I wonder if the touchpad driver uses polling insted of interrupts? Edit: also post /var/run/dmesg.boot and the output of intrctl list . For the intrctl , do two of them & use the touchpad in between.

tcmart14 We explained this last time and OP ignored us, so, whatever. NetBSD has ports that run on several megabytes of memory, the i386 port can boot on around 24-32. If it had problems managing memory we'd have noticed... This isn't a customer support hotline, we're all volunteers. I develop NetBSD on an i5 ThinkPad X250 and use that machine daily for music production, web browsing, and programming, so I'm well aware of how it runs on that hardware. If you think you've found bugs, feel free to report them through the proper channels rather than a post on a user community forum.

nia Same goes for the Gtk theming issue.

nia We explained this last time and OP ignored us, so, whatever. Frankly, I am pissed off reading this. I have absolutely, positively NOT ignored you on this matter at all. Do you seriously think I have gone through the trouble of writing all the above, my findings and observations, explaining how I tried to solve the issues, only to hear from you and @pin that I am simply ignoring you and it is all just in my head ? Because that seems to be what you are implying. nia This isn't a customer support hotline, we're all volunteers. Is that how I come across to you? Do you want me to just write nothing but "praise" instead of pointing out the issues I've had so they may be resolved or taken into account? Did I bash NetBSD here? I surely didn't write all this with that intention. I have been ging to great lengths to learn about, use, test, and get your "product" (since you said "customer hotline") to work for me as an alternative to Linux after lots of quiet personal research prior to posting here, and have also made a small donation to the NetBSD project as a token of my appreciation. And you come back to me with this condescending attitude? You are simply unwilling to accept that maybe, just maybe, despite my realizing RAM allocation is different under NetBSD (which I perfectly understand by now), performance is still not good to me, even compared to OpenBSD. I am posting this to help your project and users, not just to help myself. What is your proposed solution? That I buy different hardware? We are talking about a X250 and a T550. Business laptops from 2015 or 2016 or so. The X250 is mentioned on the NetBSD Wiki. Perhaps my expectations were wrong. pin nia Same goes for the Gtk theming issue. Yes, because I only made 10 attempts at figuring something out that and browsing through the libreoffice directories to figure and compare them with other *BSD installations and Linux, even going through the Arch wiki and so on, endlessly, hoping to figure this out on my own before "complaining" here. If I posted that it does not work for me, it's not just on a single attempt, but after having thoroughly looked into this. But I am not a developer. I expect this sort of stuff to just pretty much "work". OpenBSD and FreeBSD handled this fine for me. Just because it works for you doesn't mean it works for everybody. I thought I'd contributed by posting this. I suppose I didn't.

tcmart14 My understanding is the high RAM usage is because NetBSD will cache as much as possible and will only free up the RAM when a process that is running needs it. I appreciate your input on this. Still, as the title says, I'm speaking of "impressions" here. Despite noticeable improvements for me using 9.2 compared to 9.1 and bearing in mind that NetBSD does indeed handle memory differently from other systems, the problem is that for me it's been far more sluggish in the end than any other system I've tried on the X250 (and/or T550) so far (Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD 6.9 - though I must add that 6.8 was slower). In itself, I don't really care much about how the system handles memory, as long as performance remains good. I'm just an "end user" basically. But that's really the issue I'm having here, despite applying several performance tweaks and using intel-microcode. I wish I had the level of expertise (and the time and patience) allowing me to provide objective benchmarks but that's a bit beyond me. With that said, everything I have written here is just the way I have perceived it, on my particular systems, with no intention of trashing NetBSD whatsoever. When I have issues with Linux (and that does happen on occasion), I state the problems, try to find solutions, and I don't go around trashing it. I thought that might be worth adding here.

rvp Thanks, rvp. I will do a clean reinstall as soon as I can and check the output of intrctl list . As for dmesg and the likes, I posted some in my previous thread for 9.1 but I'll make sure to post some output for 9.2 when I get around to it, as well.

nia If you think you've found bugs, feel free to report them through the proper channels rather than a post on a user community forum. Okay, so please do tell me what this user community forum is for then if not to share user experiences? Am I not a user, perhaps? Do you approve of reviews only if it's all praise? You only pointed out just now you use NetBSD on a X250. Well, why not share your input then, if this is a user community? What you don't seem to get is that I am talking about performance . While I initially was tempted to associate the issue with RAM usage, I realized that was the wrong way of looking at it so that is not how I approached my 9.2 installation. Still, when you have a sluggish system that doesn't even let you change the XFCE whisker menu icon and seeing all the RAM go up during that very operation then it is, I believe, quite understandable that you'd conflate the two. Yet I am very well aware performance and RAM handling aren't one and the same thing. Did I also mention network file transfers are slower compared to any other system I've run on the X250 (or any of my Thinkpads for that matter)?

netneo Frankly, I am pissed off reading this. Wow! Honestly,... go figure! only to hear from you and @pin that I am simply ignoring you and it is all just in my head ? Because that seems to be what you are implying. No, it's not only in your head... I've experienced the same on two linux distros, one of them Ubuntu based. Yes, because I only made 10 attempts at figuring something out that and browsing through the libreoffice directories to figure.... As mentioned, I had the same issue on Linux.

pin Wow! Honestly,... go figure! Considering that I have not ignored your or anyone's remarks/tips/advice here or elsewhere, I don't need any smug remarks suggesting I'm basically a moron who's "ignored" your advice because I haven't. Read my post again. I'm talking about performance. That's the headline under which I posted it. You can keep defending how NetBSD handles RAM if that's what you like but that's totally not the point anymore here for me. It's that I'm having performance issues and I'm simply reporting on that here, hoping to figure out why that is and what can be done. Would you rather I cheer and say "wow, works awesome, no issues at all" if that's not the case? Reporting a problem means I'm interested in the system, see how it works and, if possible, find solutions to issues I've encountered. Many would probably just abandon and leave it at that. pin As mentioned, I had the same issue on Linux. Yes, and when I pointed out the issue persisted for me under NetBSD, you basically respond by saying "it works for me". Good for you, but that doesn't mean it'll magically work for me also. I appreciate you tried to help me out and it's obviously not anyone's fault but I've tried everything I could think of on my own as well. I seem to recall @neubaer reporting the same problem (see here ). With that said, for what it's worth, I've submitted pretty much all the issues I've found to the NetBSD bug mailing lists.

General impressions after using NetBSD 9.2 on a Thinkpad X250

rvp

netneo The ACPI errors are present on another Thinkpad as well but have never caused any issues for me so it was never much of a concern to me so far.

Not usually a problem--except for programs like acpidump which will fail part-way when it hits that mismatch. What I meant was that, to fix this error, you need a BIOS update. Both Linux and NetBSD report a similar error on my laptop as well.

netneo

Okay, so I've taken out a day or so to go through all this and report my findings. Just before I began writing this, I experienced a fatal breakpoint trap (see here). Ouch.

That'll do for now so I'll just report on everything I observed or managed to test.

@rvp, I've tried to follow your advice to the best of my abilities but may have overlooked some things, though. I've gathered as much output as I could although some things might be missing. I've tested -HEAD before doing a clean reinstall of 9.2 which has been my main focus.

EDIT: For what it's worth, I just wanted to add that I didn't encrypt any partition this time. I enabled WAPBL as before.

So, here's an overview:

BIOS settings

Checked everything just to be sure. Didn't look into updating so far as I didn't feel like messing with the BIOS since I haven't had any issues running other operating systems.

Secure boot -> OFF
I/O settings -> bluetooth switched OFF (never use it)
Virtualization -> all set
UEFI boot -> legacy only (as usual)
System date -> date is fine but I set the clock to UTC (was on localtime)

On the battery issue, I've re-checked but haven't noticed anything wrong with it. Seems just fine to me.

Testing -HEAD

1. Audio & touchpad

Seemed fine at first. I only used the touchpad, no mouse. When switching between TTYs (so not even necessarily while using the touchpad), I suddenly got "static" on audio output and some "reverbing". This eventually disappears but it's annoying when it happens as it's unpredictable.

Just want to note here that this is a machine on which I typically use only the touchpad so I basically expect it to just work or be fairly straightforward to get it to work. I realize now that a lack of two-finger scrolling, which apparently is not currently supported on Synaptics, is a sacrifice I'm not really willing to make on this machine.

2. Networking

I exclusively use wireless on my laptops, never (or rarely) Ethernet, with a static IP. On shutdown, as with 9.2, I get iwm0 fatal firmware error. Otherwise, though, it connects and appears to be working normally.

3. Performance

Seemed better to me than 9.2 but I focused my attention on 9.2.

4. VIM

Could not install it on -HEAD due to some missing dependency, something I experienced with other packages as well (e.g. libreoffice). But we're focusing on 9.2 here of course. Here's the output:

/usr/lib/libterminfo.so.1, needed by vim-gtk3-8.2.2557nb3 is not present in this system.

40 packages to install:
[...]
0 to refresh, 0 to upgrade, 40 to install
53M to download, 369M to install
the following packages have unmet requirements: vim-gtk3-8.2.2557nb3

4. More output for reference:

rc.conf
dmesg
intcrtl before & after touchpad use
envstat (xfce + firefox-esr with three loaded websites)
envstat (xfce upon attempting to change the menu icon)
top (xfce + firefox-esr with three loaded websites)
Xorg.log

Testing 9.2

1. Touchpad, audio, etc

Given the issues with the touchpad and audio I reported on earlier, I tried @rvp 's fix with regular X11 and modular Xorg. Unfortunately, it didn't make any significant difference to me.

CPU still running way too hot, particularly when transferring files (e.g. over the network) or when trying to change the XFCE menu icon after installing papirus-icon-theme. At some point, the CPU temperature went up to 80 °C as you'll see in the pastebins.

2. VIM

@rvp, I tried your suggestion but that didn't work, though I think you'd figured that out and that's why you suggested I build vim from pkgsrc, right? So I went ahead, got the kernel sources, obtained the latest pkgsrc version, and built vim-gtk3 from source.

Unfortunately, no luck. I admit I may of course have overlooked something here. I rarely compile software, I rely on binary packages in 99% of the cases so if I needed to do anything specific, I haven't. In any case, it didnt respect my ~/.vimrc settings. At least, not the termguicolors and colorscheme part. Here's the output I got:

E558: Terminal entry not found in terminfo
'xterm-x256color' not known. Available builtin terminals are:
builtin_gui
builtin_dumb
defaulting to 'ansi'
E437: terminal capability "cm" required
Press ENTER or type command to continue

3. Networking

Wifi generally just works as it did before but file transfers tend to slow down, even on the local network.

example output after getting an mp3 from the local network with sftp:

100% 11MB 696.8KB/s 896.0KB/s

Normally transfer speed would have to be almost twice as much.

pinging local machines: see here

4. Virtualization

I didn't get around to testing nvmm this time though I built haxm from pkgsrc. This time it built fine (I'd filed a bug report on this and it got fixed, thanks for that) but when loading the module, things went haywire and I had to reset my machine (the laptop, that is). No idea what happened. I saved a coredump but I'm not sure where to put that.

4. Output for reference:

rc.conf (see above as it's pretty much the same as on -HEAD)
dmesg
intrctl before and after touchpad use
envstat (xfce, running idle)
envstat (xfce + firefox-esr with 3 websites loaded)
envstat (same as above but with a YouTube video playing)
envstat (xfce, attempting to change menu icon)
envstat (xfce, still attempting to change it and temperature rising...)
envstat (xfce, before I decide to close X11 and end up with the breakpoint trap not long after that)
top (after installing xfce + vlc + firefox-esr + libreoffice with pkgin)
top (xfce, while changing menu icon)
Xorg.log

By way of comparison, this is the output on a T550 running Devuan Linux with virtually identical specs to the X250 (except 16gb RAM and not 8Gb as on the X250). I had the above mentioned issues with NetBSD on that machine, too, so it's not the X250. Should have taken some top and sysctl output from OpenBSD or FreeBSD running on the X250 when I had the chance but, alas, I didn't. At any rate, performance was better for me with those.

top - An ordinary session. Xfce, Firefox with loads of tabs, a vlc video playing, music player running, etc. Nothing unusual.
sensors - For that same session.

Conclusion

As it stands, I'd rather revisit NetBSD when 10 comes out, since -HEAD did seem to run smoother. I won't be having so much time on my hands in the time to come to (re)install, tinker, test, compile software, and start the process all over again. So if I do want to run a BSD on the X250 while getting the most out of the machine and getting productive, I'm probably better off with OpenBSD for now. But as always, your mileage may vary!

@rvp Thanks a lot for all your input and suggestions, much appreciated

Cheers.

rvp

netneo I won't be having so much time on my hands in the time to come to (re)install, tinker, test, compile software, and start the process all over again. So if I do want to run a BSD on the X250 while getting the most out of the machine and getting productive, I'm probably better off with OpenBSD for now.

I have a ton of questions, and answers to account for some of your woes, but I'm wondering if I should carry on here since you seem to have plumped for OpenBSD now...

netneo

rvp I'm always open to suggestions but to be perfectly honest here, I decided to - quite literally - pull the plug last night after that fatal breakpoint trap. I've reached a "fatal breakpoint" of my own here and need to put this aside.

I like pushing my own boundaries but there are limits. I like to manually configure my systems and don't mind some tinkering, tweaking and tuning on the side. I do that pretty much all the time because I generally like that. But at one point I want to just get on with my business and "use" or "administer" the system.

So to my mind, it's not a matter of "plumping" for any particular OS but just opting for what legitimately works for me, and taking into account to which degree I'm willing ot accept some quirks. When I begin to think in terms of ROI then I know it's time to move on. OpenBSD has its issues too, though, but overall things work pretty much as expected.

That said I'll see where I can file bugs so it might be of use to others, and I'll revisit when 10 comes out. Might also add some ouput here from OpenBSD to compare. The BSD experiment goes on for me.

Cheers.

rvp

netneo I decided to - quite literally - pull the plug last night after that fatal breakpoint trap. I've reached a "fatal breakpoint" of my own here and need to put this aside.

That was one of the issues I had in mind. That trap shouldn't happen. It indicates either a) a kernel bug, or b) a HW issue. Going by the x2apic + DMAR & the prolific pms timeout messages, I lean towards b).

netneo Might also add some ouput here from OpenBSD to compare.

Please do. I'm curious to see how OpenBSD does on your HW.

netneo

rvp Please do. I'm curious to see how OpenBSD does on your HW.

Hi @rvp and everyone else chiming in.

While I'm at it, I thought I might as well go straight ahead, do a fresh reinstall of OpenBSD 6.9, do my usual setup and actually save some output this time for completeness' sake.

OpenBSD 6.9 on a Thinkpad X250

The installation process is very straightforward once you're used to it so it was done in no time. Wireless was not available during install but I'd downloaded all relevant drivers (iwm, video) and put them on a ext2 formatted usb drive.

This is how I went about it:

mount /dev/sd1i /mnt
fw_update -p /mnt

I then did the following:

(pre-)configured my network in anticipation of the next reboot
ran syspatch to patch the system
enabled apm with rcctl enable apmd && rcctl set apmd flags -A && rcctl start apmd
tweaked /etc/wsconsctl.conf a little (has to be copied from /etc/examples/wsconsctl.conf)
and rebooted the machine

With network up and running, I installed various packages (the usual), enabled and started xenodm (roughly equivalent to xdm), set up my .xsession file, logged in and was greeted by Xfce's friendly mouse.

Here's an overview of some things:

Suspend-to-RAM and Hibernation

Both work fine, from the Xfce menu (must be member of the operator group) and on the console, with zzz or ZZZ respectively. Wake on lid open works. Mouse still works after wake-up. No loss of network connectivity.

XFCE

Battery is detected. Requires the battery plugin, which you have to install manually if you just installed "xfce" at first.

Performance

Changing the Xfce (whisker/application) menu icon (after installing the latest papirus-icon-theme using their install script from github) has become a bit of a "performance test" to me as it seems it's resource-intensive on any system I've used (including Linux).

Now, I was able to change the (whisker) menu icon. Not without some kicking and screaming as it did struggle and take a while for the icon selector to open. CPU temperatures did go up quite a bit. It took a couple of minutes for it to load but at least it did and I was able to set my preferred icon and get it over with.

Based on what I've observed so far, CPU temperatures are higher than on Linux (by about 10 °C) but stabler than on NetBSD. As for RAM, it's similar in some ways to NetBSD but overall looks more like what I'm used to under Linux.

Touchpad

No issues. As mentioned earlier, it just works. Tapping can be enabled in /etc/wsconsctl.conf. Two-finger scrolling works out of the box.

Thinkpad buttons

Work out of the box for audio (mute + volume) and to control the backlight (increase/decrease brightness).

Audio

This is a bit trickier. I've reported a bug to the OpenBSD folks on this as audio output is garbled. This should not be necessary, but setting the sniod flags to -m play solves this, although apparently this disables recording (which doesn't matter much to me). I also used cmixer (must be installed separately), similar to NetBSD's aiomixer for some fiddling.

I did get some "static" at one point so I may have to give it some more time for fair comparison. But it was less severe than on NetBSD 9.x. and quickly disappeared. Overall, the sniod -m play workaround seems to do its job and playback is mostly fine.

VIM

Works fine. Colorscheme is respected in terminals (tested with xfce4-terminal and terminator). See screenshot further down below.

LibreOffice v7

GTK theming is respected out of the box so no headaches or eye-bleeding Windows 95 throwbacks there for me. See screenshot link further down below.

Network transfers

The same mp3 file "begotten" over sftp as mentioned in my previous message:

100% 11MB 1.1MB/s 00:09

As opposed to:

100% 11MB 696.8KB/s 896.0KB/s

Output for reference

I think that more or less covers it so here are some pastebins and screenshots:

dmesg ( edit: includes first boot as well so beware)
Xorg.0.log
sysctl hw.sensors (xfce, firefox-esr with 3 loaded websites)
sysctl hw.sensors (as above + vlc + libreoffice + quod libet playing mp3)
sysctl hw.sensors (temperatures rising as I change the menu icon)
top (during that same operation)
top (xfce, firefox-esr with 3 loaded websites)
top (as above + vlc + libreoffice + quod libet playing mp3)
xfce + vim screenshot
xfce + libreoffice screenshot

EDIT: added more top output.
RE-EDIT: added a note on the Thinkpad buttons
RE-RE-EDIT: corrected the apmd command (forgot set there)

Cheers.

tcmart14

netneo You should try running multiple concurrent work loads on OpenBSD. I don't know where they are at now with multi/hyperthreading, but I know in the past they held this back a bit over security concerns. I'd be curious testing 2 heavy workloads that require multiple threads on bother NetBSD and OpenBSD and comparing.

Or I could have read up incorrectly on that with threading jobs on OpenBSD, or it just be way outdated.

rvp

netneo Touchpad

No issues. As mentioned earlier, it just works.

Any timeout, or reset messages from the kernel in dmesg?

netneo

tcmart14 Yeah, I'm not sure. I found this article on that issue from 2018 but I don't know what the current status is.

netneo

rvp No, nothing in particular. No issues with it. Here's the dmesg output:

   pms0 at pckbc0 (aux slot)
   wsmouse0 at pms0 mux 0
   wsmouse1 at pms0 mux 0
   pms0: Synaptics clickpad, firmware 8.1, 0x1e2b1 0x943300 0x330340 0xf002a3 0x12e800

rvp

netneo Alrighty, I've found out why set termguicolors doesn't work on NetBSD.

It's caused by the 1st bit of this patch which disables VIM's built-in escape sequences for commonly-used terminals. These esc. sequences do the modern background+foreground colour stuff. Without these, VIM only seems to do either the standard 16 ANSI colours, or 256 colours if TERM=xterm-256color.

But, post a PR. If it's not needed for portability or some such, then that bit of the patch can be removed. (If you #define NO_BUILTIN_TCAPS, then both Linux and FreeBSD also fail to honour set termguicolors--exactly like NetBSD.)

« Previous Page