FreeBSD 7.x with Thinkpad X200

[Peter Hofer]

Hello everyone,

I consider buying a Lenovo IBM Thinkpad X200 (Montevina) and would like to run 
FreeBSD 7.1/amd64 (or for now, RELENG_7) on it.

So far, I have not been able to find any information on running FreeBSD on 
this particular laptop, only a thread about using it with OpenBSD from the 
misc at openbsd.org mailing list (with dmesg): 
http://www.mail-archive.com/misc@openbsd.org/msg66846.html

Does anyone have experience with FreeBSD on this laptop?

(It seems the X200 and T400 are not so different, so I would appreciate 
comments from T400 owners as well!)

I am particularly interested in the following:

1. Will the on-board 10/100/1000 Ethernet card work with em(4)? According to 
the openbsd-misc post mentioned earlier, it is an 82567LM chip, which is not 
listed explicitly in the manual page. Although I would prefer to use em(4), 
Intel itself also provides a driver binary for FreeBSD 7.x, has anyone tried 
it?

2. As far as I know, no driver is available for the Intel 5100 and Intel 5300 
wireless LAN adapters, but Lenovo also offers another adapter named "ThinkPad 
11b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Express Adapter III". In the past, similar 
adapters had an Atheros chip. Should I expect this adapter to be supported by 
ath(4) or go for an ExpressCard or USB solution instead?

3. Will SpeedStep work with cpufreq/powerd? (According to a follow-up to the 
openbsd-misc post, a patch is required to make it work on OpenBSD.) Also, 
will suspend/resume work?

4. This may depend more on xf86-video-intel than on FreeBSD: Can the desktop 
be easily cloned or extended to an additional display device connected via 
VGA? This is very important to me since I plan on using the laptop for 
presentations too.

5. Can I expect the components of the X200 UltraBase docking station to work 
out of the box, in particular a UltraBay slim optical drive, the USB ports, 
the DisplayPort and the Ethernet connector?

Thank you very much!

Best regards,
Peter Hofer