OpenBSD 4.9 on the Lenovo G555 - suspend/resume works

I did a quick/dirty installation of OpenBSD 4.9 (i386) to the Lenovo G555. I didn't install to the hard drive, but instead to an 8 GB USB flash drive, which provides far from optimal performance but allows me to test hardware compatibility.

That and the fact that OpenBSD can be installed in about five minutes makes it easy to test new releases.

I had been intrigued by a line in the release announcement that said:

Support for Mobility Radeon HD 4200 has been added to radeondrm(4).

Hey, that's my graphics chip in the Lenovo G555! Not that I was having any trouble with video in OpenBSD over the past few releases because I wasn't.

But any individual attention the the old HD 4200 is much appreciated.

I also wanted to test suspend/resume, a feature the OpenBSD developers have been improving from release to release.

My tests of OpenBSD 4.9 on both the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 (Intel 82830/830m) graphics) and IBM Thinkpad R32 (ATI graphics of some kind) had suspend/resume not working. But Linux suspend/resume doesn't work on these machines either.

But on the Lenovo G555 (AMD Athlon II 2.1 GHz CPU), Linux suspend/resume does work. I'm enjoying it now in Debian Squeeze (and after all the time I've spent having it not work on machines, enjoy is most definitely the right word).

So I loaded up OpenBSD 4.9, installing from a CD to the flash drive.

Once I booted into the new system, I turned on apmd as root:

# apmd

Then I issued the suspend command as my user:

$ zzz

Wouldn't you know it, the thing suspended.

I tapped the space bar and it resumed. Success.

Again, OpenBSD from this particular 8 GB USB flash drive on this particular laptop is not a pleasant experience (nor is running any other system booted from said flash drive, and I've done this with Debian and Ubuntu in the recent past).

And setting up a fully functional desktop system for my needs in OpenBSD isn't something I can do in an hour (or a day).

And ... (you knew there was another "and"), how can I give up on perfectly working Debian Squeeze no matter how much I want to run OpenBSD again?

I'll probably go there at some point, either with this laptop or another slab of hardware. I need to do a full GNOME desktop to see if the gam_server problem I'm having in Jggimi's live disc manifests itself in a "real" install (that problem being gam_server eating 80-99 percent of CPU on a continual basis).

But now I know that perfect graphics and working suspend/resume can be mine in OpenBSD. It borders on the profound (and no, I'm not exaggerating).