Best $1000 Freebsd laptop?

[Xn Nooby]

Thanks, I will take a look at the Dell Latitudes.  How much RAM does
yours have, and how much did you allocate to ZFS?



On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 9:27 AM, Tom Evans <tevans.uk at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>