When my T430s arrived, OpenBSD didn’t yet support Sandy/Ivy Bridge graphics, so I stuck with Windows and OpenBSD in VMWare. Things change and now I want to run OpenBSD natively. I’m using TrueCrypt on the whole drive and trying to resize that while introducing another boot loader seemed a risky proposition, so I cheated a little by taking advantage of my laptop’s mSATA port and installed a 64GB Crucial m4 mSATA SSD, a trivial upgrade.

Plug in an external hard drive I keep around for booting OpenBSD and boot bsd.rd. In keeping with protecting all the data on this laptop, I encrypted the whole drive as well. By the time I got to the disk setup part of the installer, I was up to sd3 (Samsung SSD, m4 SSD, USB disk, softraid). A few years ago I would have marveled at installing OpenBSD on a laptop with 4 “SCSI” disks.

OpenBSD runs well, as expected, except for the USB3 ports which are completely dead. In order to get turbo boost modes out of the CPU, I have to goose hw.setperf after boot. My theory is that we boot in the P1 state, but the kernel assumes we are in P0 because the current frequency matches the CPU’s designated operating frequency. (I’m supposed to know more about this, but have kind of forgotten the particulars of setperf and cpu scaling.) Suspend and resume appear reliable.

X works on the native panel and with an external monitor, although it requires fiddling with xrandr. I unfortunately discovered that xrandr likes to reset the dpi setting, and X’s (or X apps’) device independent scaling is total balls, so the first thing to do after getting all the screens set up is running xrandr --dpi 96 again. By default, two finger scrolling works, but tap to click doesn’t. xinput --set-prop 7 "Synaptics Tap Action" 0 0 0 0 1 3 is the magic command to fix that.

Back on the Windows side, some fiddling with VMWare lets me boot the disk as a VM, enabling data transfer between disks. Be careful not to suspend and resume the VMWare image, though. softraid prints a roaming disk warning about the device changing, but copes with the change. Using DUIDs in fstab makes the whole thing transparent.

Performance is good. I can get about 250MB/s reading from the raw Samsung 830 SSD and 170MB/s from the m4. I think the 128GB or 256GB models may offer better performance having more NAND dies, and 128GB is certainly at a better point on the price/GB curve, but 64GB was more than sufficient for my OpenBSD storage needs. softraid cuts the read performance from the encrypted drive down to 120MB/s, so I think there’s some optimization work that can be done there, but it still feels fast.

real mem = 16845570048 (16065MB)
avail mem = 16389435392 (15630MB)
Memory: Real: 703M/2785M act/tot Free: 13G Cache: 1748M Swap: 0K/1020M

^ Lots of memory

cpu0: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3320M CPU @ 2.60GHz, 2594.52 MHz
cpu0: Enhanced SpeedStep 2594 MHz: speeds: 2601, 2600, 2500, 2400, 2300, 2200, 2100, 2000, 1900, 1800, 1700, 1600, 1500, 1400, 1300, 1200 MHz

^ This is where I think switching between 2601 and 2600 makes all the difference with turbo boost.

sd0 at scsibus0 targ 0 lun 0: <ATA, SAMSUNG SSD 830, CXM0> SCSI3 0/direct
sd0: 244198MB, 512 bytes/sector, 500118192 sectors, thin
sd1 at scsibus0 targ 2 lun 0: <ATA, M4-CT064M4SSD3, 07MH> SCSI3 0/direct
sd1: 61057MB, 512 bytes/sector, 125045424 sectors, thin
sd2 at scsibus2 targ 1 lun 0: <OPENBSD, SR CRYPTO, 005> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd2: 61051MB, 512 bytes/sector, 125033303 sectors

^ Lots of disks