Post B0qjMXg6GHlOT6omAa by mason@partychickens.net
(DIR) More posts by mason@partychickens.net
(DIR) Post #B0lTUDbmC6trU0dOWO by stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe
2025-11-29T16:25:51Z
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FreeBSD 15.0 (almost)-RELEASE, using pkgbase, on my Ryzen 9 MiniPC (and compared to openSUSE Tumbleweed):- Full disk encryption works beautifully via GELI, as usual.- Installing KDE is easy and it works perfectly on Wayland.- All my main apps work. Others will run via the Linuxulator or Wine (Linux browsers, WinBox for MikroTik, etc).- The fan seems more relaxed.- The system generally feels snappier.- Native ZFS. I can autosnapshot every 5 minutes. If I try to do this with btrfs - snapshots of the home directory included and quotas enabled - the system hangs while handling them (which is why Tumbleweed doesn’t snapshot home by default).- The media keys on my keyboard work, but volume control uses huge steps and 30 percent is already extremely loud. This can be fixed. The monitor brightness setting is also a bit off, but I don't care.- amdgpu works perfectly.- The wifi card works. I haven’t tested the speed because I immediately installed the realtek-re-kmod driver to use the 2.5 Gbit ethernet connection.- Suspend doesn’t work. This is a big problem for me. It’s probably more psychological than technical, but I can’t leave the computer powered for hours when I’m not using it. I already have servers running 24/7 here. I even considered putting my Qotom FreeBSD server in a VM. It would probably work, but next summer it might be an issue because temperatures here aren’t low and spinning disks don’t love heat (and I don’t love their noise).- It’s stable and reliable. I’ve done almost everything and it just works, as expected.- Some small glitches remain, mostly due to missing configuration or packages (I didn’t tune anything. I just installed it and started using it).A much smoother experience than a year ago, when I bought it. Will I keep using FreeBSD on this minipc? I’m not sure yet, since Tumbleweed works great and the lack of suspend really influences my choice. I'll contact Aymeric and try to offer some help to improve this.For now, I’ll keep it on an external SSD and switch from time to time, especially when I know I’ll be using the minipc for hours.#Linux #FreeBSD #Desktop #openSUSE
(DIR) Post #B0lTUFGE3CqkbkZDCy by mason@partychickens.net
2025-11-29T17:53:35Z
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@stefano Are you saying the fan is driven harder under Linux? That would be an interesting reversal.
(DIR) Post #B0lTUGMzvVrS32k8P2 by stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe
2025-11-30T07:54:32Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@mason I don't think the OS is driving the fan. It's a consequence of the load, so it seems that FreeBSD is lighter on the resources. It might also be because of a more conservative throttling
(DIR) Post #B0lZPqlRmkpzCTSSYa by mason@partychickens.net
2025-11-30T09:01:05Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@stefano Lower load under FreeBSD is still interesting. I thought Linux still had a serious advantage with fancier interrupt handling in it's tickless kernel, timer coalescing, etc., but maybe I'm behind the times. Is it apples to apples in terms of what's running in userland under each of Linux and FreeBSD?
(DIR) Post #B0od6CYw0sFIIzN6Ku by feld@friedcheese.us
2025-12-01T18:37:10.845982Z
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@mason @stefano I don't know if that's ever been true. I've had the same large workload on identical servers that takes Linux to hundreds or even 1000+ load average but FreeBSD handles it just fine staying under 100Also FreeBSD can still be ssh'd into when the load average is near 1000, but Linux... good luck. You'll be waiting tens of minutes just for the shell prompt if you can get past the sshd
(DIR) Post #B0od6DrlAMtkLfBeJk by mason@partychickens.net
2025-12-01T19:48:01Z
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@feld @stefano My impression is that it didn't show up in the ability to process things in bulk - all scheduler stuff - so much as the ability to not use power at idle; think laptop battery life, for example.But it's been a while since I've spent significant time with FreeBSD in an environment where idle-time power consumption was measurable, let alone mattered.
(DIR) Post #B0od7Cw86jdfkshV68 by feld@friedcheese.us
2025-12-01T20:26:51.127183Z
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@mason @stefano oh yeah that makes sense then
(DIR) Post #B0p9yvU6PIdtncFYA4 by mason@partychickens.net
2025-12-02T01:13:46Z
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@feld @stefano I'm installing 15 (now released!) on a ThinkPad tonight, so I'll get a chance to test it out in the real world.
(DIR) Post #B0qcJI5b43s3ZaFL6G by feld@friedcheese.us
2025-12-02T19:27:14.744433Z
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@mason @stefano ooh i forgot to mention this trick I found posted somewhere onlinehw.pci.do_power_nodriver=3put that in your /boot/loader.conf and it will reduce power usage caused by any devices we don't have a driver for
(DIR) Post #B0qjMXg6GHlOT6omAa by mason@partychickens.net
2025-12-02T19:49:32Z
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@feld @stefano Oh, interesting. I'm curious why that's not a default! I wonder what the best way is to list driverless hardware.Is this documented somewhere? The default is zero, and if "3" is magic there must be a range of options. Also, must it be in /boot/loader.conf? Seems like it could live in /etc/sysctl.conf, or is that too late?
(DIR) Post #B0qjMZ7Qu9DmwAc7Pc by feld@friedcheese.us
2025-12-02T20:46:14.419649Z
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@mason @stefano it's documented in the pci(4) man page. The other options are explained (some device classes are left at full power)