OpenBSD on the Lenovo A485

Posted on Mon, 15 Oct 2018 09:00:00 MDT by Aaron Bieber

I am going to attempt to do a jcs@ style review of the Lenovo A485. I have stolen his format, slacked on detail.. and generally not done as good of a job reviewing as he has. Please check out his work at jcs.org

Hardware

In typical Lenovo fashion, the A485 has three point eight gajillion configuration options one can select from during “Customization”. You can even get it with a built in SmartCard™ reader!

You can select SATA SSD or NVMe SSD, anywhere from 4GB to 32GB of Memory, AMD Ryzen™ 3, 5 or 7!

Since this is going to be my main machine for as many years as I can possibly squeeze out of it, I opted for “all the things!”!

The display options leave a little to be desired. Max resolution is 1920x1080. Not bad but not great either.

Installing OpenBSD

Put install media into laptop.

Politely ask Henry on stand on the “enter” key.

\o/

Support Summary

OpenBSD-current as of 2018-10-15

Component Works? Notes Accelerated graphics No The Radeon™ Vega 6 integrated GPU isn’t supported currently. X11 is usable via the efifb driver which does an impressive job and displays things at the native resolution (1920x1080)! I am able to watch youtube videos without issue. AC adapter Yes USB-C connector. Has a satisfying click when connecting.. flops about wildly while connected. Attaches as acpiac. Audio Yes-ish Audio works as expected though there is a known bug with azalia on Ryzen that causes it to stop working after a period of time. Battery status Yes Status is visible in apm and hw.sensors . Attaches as acpibat. Bluetooth No No support in OpenBSD. BT can be disabled in the bios. Cameras No When attempting to use the camera via /dev/video , the “activity” light turns on, but it seems the video device isn’t compatible. Awesome side note, there is a built-in slider to cover the camera lens! Ethernet Yes Weirdly, there are two ethernet devices, re0 and re1 . re1 is the physical ethernet port on the laptop. I can only assume that re0 is the would-be-dock-ethernet? Hibernation Maybe This could be because I didn’t create a swap partition that was 32GB. MicroSD slot Yes Inserted cards show up fine. Suspend/Resume No Technically the machine suspends / resumes, but X11 never comes back. Volume buttons Yes Via acpithinkpad. Wireless No The machine comes with a Realtek RTL8822BE, which isn’t supported currently. I was able to replace this with an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265.

Here are some photos of the built-in camera cover I mention in the Summary above.

dmesg