Things to Do After New OpenBSD Install

So you have installed OpenBSD as main OS. Most of the things will work out of the box. But still you have to configure some things.

Lock screen on suspend/hibernate/resume

Login as root and create /etc/apm directory if it isn’t there already.

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mkdir /etc/apm
echo "pkill -USR1 xidle" > /etc/apm/suspend
echo "pkill -USR1 xidle" > /etc/apm/resume
echo "pkill -USR1 xidle" > /etc/apm/hibernate
chmod +x /etc/apm/suspend
chmod +x /etc/apm/hibernate
chmod +x /etc/apm/resume

On lid closure, machines mostly get suspended. But once you open it up, they won’t be locked. Due to these scripts we just created, they will be locked now.

Wheel group

Add your user to wheel and staff group.

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usermod -G wheel,staff 'your username'

Configure doas

In OpenBSD, we have alternative of sudo. Although you can install and use sudo but it has security issues.

We have already added our user to wheel group so now we will configure doas to allow wheel group members runnig privileged commands without password.

Add this line to /etc/doas.conf

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vi /etc/doas.conf
...
permit nopass keepenv :wheel
...

Power management with apmd

apmd is Advanced Power Management Daemon. You can use it to save some power and also for cooling CPU.

I have found this settings very useful for my laptop.

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rcctl enable apmd
rcctl set apmd flags "-C -z 45"

You can adopt it to your needs. -C flag will increase or decrease CPU speed depending on CPU load.

The CPU speed with this will be increased to 50% every second if the load is over 70%. Once the load drops under 70%, apm will decrease the CPU speed 20% every second till the CPU is at its lowest speed.

If you’re working and want to make sure CPU is running at full, just execute apm -H. And it will clock the CPU to full speed. After you’re done, just execute apm -C to put the system back into cool running mode.

About the -z 45 flag, well, I’m a lazy person. Sometimes I leave my laptop opened and fell asleep and in the next hour there might be a power shutdown for hours. This flag actually allows you to put your machine into suspend mode once battery level goes below 45% saving you some battery juice.

There is also -Z flag for hibernate. You can try both of them. The last one will supersede the other.

login.conf

Change datasize-max and datasize-cur values to 4096M. Also change openfiles-max and openfiles-cur to 4096.

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vi /etc/login.conf
...

default:\
	:path=/usr/bin /bin /usr/sbin /sbin /usr/X11R6/bin /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin:\
	:umask=022:\
	:datasize-max=4096M:\
	:datasize-cur=4096M:\
	:maxproc-max=256:\
	:maxproc-cur=128:\
	:openfiles-max=4096:\
	:openfiles-cur=4096:\
	:stacksize-cur=4M:\
	:localcipher=blowfish,a:\
	:tc=auth-defaults:\
	:tc=auth-ftp-defaults:

...

Disable console log

xenodm is default display manager. It enables a console log once X is started. You can disable it by commenting the line like this.

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vi /etc/X11/xenodm/Xsetup_0
...
# xconsole -geometry 480x130-0-0 -daemon -notify -verbose -fn fixed -exitOnFail
...

Ending this post

There are lot more things I have configured by hand. This list is still not completed. I’ll keep it updated as I get some free time :)

Thanks for reading…