I've done some tests under CTWM and XFCE4 using LibreOffice, Firefox,
Thunderbird, GIMP, Inkscape, KiCAD.
Display performance doesn't seem to be an issue.
Memory is ok, there are 2.7GB free out of 4GB.
Disk is a 500GB M.2 SSD.
The limiting factor seems to be the CPU, applications start and react to
user actions slowly.
All the applications I tested work except Kicad, which is unusable (the
"Could not use OpenGL" error pops up all the time).
I've watched a music clip on YouTube, the sound was impeccable and the
video was missing frames, but still acceptable.
Conclusions:
- Display performance without i915drmkms is quite acceptable for most
applications, as you said
- A 4-core, 1.1GHz Pentium is not enough to run a NetBSD desktop
On 30/06/2025 00:26, Greg Troxel wrote:
Vincent DEFERT <vincent.def...@posteo.net> writes:
I saw the "boot -c" command in INSTALL.html and tried it.
By disabling the i915drmkms driver, I could successfully install
NetBSD, and WiFi even works!
However, I have to use boot -c every time I boot the machine, and this
is not viable.
Hence 2 questions:
2. Does this mean I will not be able to use X with decent performance?
If you want to run xterm and emacs mostly, it should be fine. If you
are trying to play video, maybe not. But try it and see; there's no
benefit to assuming instead.
