Thinkpad laptops and resume

[PeerCorps Trust Fund]

Hi All,

Two items.

I know there have been some recent discussions in the lists about using Chromebooks with Dragaonfly. Thinkpads still seem to have better out of the box support from what we have seen on our end across all of the BSDs, including Dragonfly. 

One question that I had for those of you who are using mainly Thinkpad workstations, are there any models out there that have worked especially well for you? What I am referring to here is anything Haswell-based obviously and older, not anything ultra new.

I ask this question for one main reason. Hopefully sometime this year, we may be in the position of testing various BSD's on a variety of laptops and documenting what works and what does not to fill in some of the gaps on the current BSD laptop pages out there. The focus for this testing will likely be limited to DragonflyBSD and FreeBSD for now. 

Also, there is a team over at FreeBSD working towards getting resume tuned and working more efficiently on laptops and I've noticed a lot of improvement in that area on FreeBSD 11.0-current. I wondered if those ACPI modifications at some level are portable to Dragonfly? OpenBSD's work seems to be very advanced in this area, but I've read that because those modifications also depend on their fork of Xorg/Xenocara, it is not trivial to port. 

Why is suspend/resume important? Well I am sure the road warriors out there have their own case scenarios. On our end we are actually setting up laptops as mini servers in classrooms. They work surprisingly well and are a very low cost way to share things across a network of portable systems. They are also wonderful in that they have "built-in" battery backups. As power cuts are common in our setting, this is quite a big deal. Having suspend/resume support means that when there is a power cut we can effectively suspend the servers for days at a time without shutting them off completely (as tested on OpenBSD). Once the power is back on, simply open the lids and everyone is back in business.

I understand that working resume is a complex affair and there are bigger priorities across the board for everyone. Earlier last year we actually explored writing some kind of grant (we are a non-profit) to partner with a developer in the BSD community to see if getting resume might be something that could be done using external funding. Is there anything out there which might suggest whether this is a beneficial type of activity to explore? Or is it better to wait for things to progress more organically?

Any thoughts on the above would certainly be appreciated.

Mike @ PeerCorps Tanzania