Best $1000 Freebsd laptop?

[Tom Evans]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 1:20 PM, Xn Nooby <xnooby at gmail.com> wrote:
> I bought a laptop that has an unsupported video card, so now it is my
> "windows laptop".  I am thinking of getting another to be my "freebsd
> laptop", so I want to make sure it really works with FreebSD.  I could
> probably spend <$1000 (USD) on one.  I like the look of the Lenovos
> but I am unfamiliar with all the different models, and have never
> bought anything from their webstore.  I normally buy from Dell or
> Amazon, and I never buy used or refurbished (unless its a car!).
>
> My main requirements are having long battery life, opengl graphics,
> vtx suppoort (virtualization).  A decent drive (500+GB) and ram (6GB+)
> would be nice.  I can't believe ZFS needs 6GB+ ram, and I am not sure
> I would want to get a lot of ram, just so I could use ZFS.  On the
> other hand, I read that UFS is getting old.  I would rather use RAM
> for running virtual machines.
>
> I'm scared to death of getting another machine that has an unsupported
> video card (like nvidia optimus), or no VTX.  I want a long lasting
> machine that I can travel with, take to work, and not be limited by.
> My windows laptop is an i3 with VTX, and is a little under-powered, so
> I am thinking of an i5+.  I don't do a lot of number-crunching, but I
> don't want it to be slow, either.
>
> Any suggestions?

I'm using a Dell Latitude E6410 with nvidia graphics option (NVS
3100M) with 8.2-STABLE*. Everything worked out of the box, except for
suspend/resume, which I personally don't care about, and have never
even tried to get working.

ZFS doesn't require 6GB of RAM, but it will use all available RAM
unless you tell it otherwise. You can limit the amount of ARC to a
sane amount depending upon your available RAM/workloads, and ZFS won't
grow much above that (ARC is not the only thing it uses memory on, but
it is the biggest). You would get decent performance limiting ZFS to ~
2GB of RAM.

Cheers

Tom

* Please don't tell me "8.2 STABLE doesn't exist, it's 8-STABLE" -
it's not according to what "uname -r" says.