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I'd love to run OpenBSD on my laptop computers, but last time I tried (5.7), the fan on my Dell Latitude 6410 was permanently on, while on FreeBSD with performance_cx_lowest="Cmax" the fan barely runs at all.

As much as I love OpenBSD, this is a knock-out criterium to me. Has the situation improved significantly since 5.7?

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CPU power management support has improved in 5.8. Better ACPI support and the drivers now use more lower-power C states.

"acpicpu(4) uses ACPI C-state information to reduce power consumption of idle CPUs. "

http://www.openbsd.org/58.html

That's great to hear! I'll definitely give it a try!

What C states does it currently support? My FreeBSD box spends most of its time in C8.

As I understand previously only C1 was used. The range has been expanded now though you'd have to read the code to see exactly what it's doing.

It seems to produce acceptable power draw figures on a ThinkPad X250 in any case.

Did you run apmd with the conservative option?

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