OpenBSD

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OpenBSD is one of the best, if not the best, operating systems you can use.

• Wine does not work on OpenBSD natively. You will have to emulate it.
• Desktop performance is reduced from what you can expect on Linux.

New versions of the OpenBSD installer include this as part of the installer.

If you do not have a wired connection you will likely need to grab firmware for your network hardware before you begin and put it in the EFI directory of your install USB after flashing. It can be installed after installation with fw_update <path to .tgz>

Hyperthreading is disabled by default as a security consideration. You can enable it by adding hw.smt=1 to /etc/sysctl.conf to make full usage of your CPU.

Service management is done with the rcctl(8) tool.

To search a package: pkg_info -Q <name>

To install a package: pkg_add <name>

By default the OpenBSD memory limits are quite low, which makes it inconvenient. There are two ways of limiting memory usage, one is the file /etc/login.conf which defines per-group/user memory limits, and kernel-defined memory limits set by sysctl. If your computer has a lot of memory then you will certainly want to adjust these.

• Firstly add your user account to the staff group, which has the highest memory limits: usermod -G staff myuser (The default memory limit for staff can also be adjusted in /etc/login.conf)
• Secondly, edit /etc/sysctl.conf

• net.inet.ip.forwarding=1
  # default: 1310
  kern.maxproc=8192
  # default: 7030
  kern.maxfiles=32768
  # default: 1950
  kern.maxthread=16384
  # shared memory settings
  kern.shminfo.shmall=536870912    # default: 8192
  kern.shminfo.shmmax=2147483647   # default: 33554432
  kern.shminfo.shmmni=4096         # default: 1024

• Logout and login.