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OpenBSD Gains Centrino Power Management

Posted by michael on from the save-a-watt-or-two dept.

In a recent email, Theo de Raadt announced support in -current for power management on the Pentium M series of processors. This allows the CPU to be throttled and therefore power saved. Additionally, dhclient was modified so that it is not necessary to find the process of the already-running dhclient and kill it before running dhclient again. This is useful for laptops that spend time roaming between different wireless networks, when dhclient is used fairly often.

1 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Re:OpenBSD and Laptops by damian.gerow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Have you looked into FreeBSD? 5.x is coming along {nicely,horribly}, and has GEOM, CPU throttling, ACPI, and pretty extensive hardware support. It's also got a more modern compiler, which has caused some small issues with OpenBSD (namely, PowerDNS won't compile and/or run).

    Don't get me wrong -- OpenBSD definitely has its place, but it's possible to secure /any/ OS. And these changes to dhclient most certainly /would/ be welcome. But I know that FreeBSD has native support for low-level encryption, and that seems to be pretty important for laptops. I also find FreeBSD makes a better desktop, but that's a matter of personal choice.