this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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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
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[โ€“] stsp@azorius.net 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] hellfire103@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 days 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.