OpenBSD i386

History:

The OpenBSD/i386 port has been present since the inception of the project. Over the years, more and more hardware support has been written specifically for OpenBSD (such as the cryptographic accelerator drivers), or adapted from FreeBSD and NetBSD.

Current status:

It can be expected to install and run with minimal difficulty on most current hardware. Machines using custom BIOS (such as older proprietary PCs, laptops, and some specialized server machines) may cause problems.

X Window System support is available for most graphics cards, using the X.Org server. As with other free operating systems, it is highly recommended that Nvidia cards are avoided since this vendor continues to show tremendous resistance towards releasing information that would allow X.Org to support their hardware properly.

Due to the increased usage of OpenBSD/amd64, as well as the age and practicality of most i386 hardware, only easy and critical security fixes are backported to i386. The project has more important things to focus on.

Supported hardware:

Processors

All CPUs compatible with the Intel Pentium or later, with Intel-compatible hardware floating point support should work.

SMP support

OpenBSD/i386 supports most SMP (Symmetrical MultiProcessor) systems, including multi-chip, multi-core and/or hyperthreading designs. To support SMP operation, a separate SMP kernel (bsd.mp) is included with the installation file sets.

Unsupported Hardware:

New hardware is constantly being released, some of which may lack support. Your donation of time, hardware, or documentation can accelerate this support!

Installation with other operating systems:

OpenBSD/i386 can be installed to share the system disks with other operating systems, such as MS-DOS, Windows or Linux, using the MBR/partition table scheme, and an optional boot selector program. Everyday operation is trouble free, but setup requires care, and several operating systems, such as Windows 95, are known to be careless about pre-existing MBR information.

Also, some laptop computers use a specific partition as suspend-to-disk storage, which should not be clobbered.

More details on this process can be found in the Installation Guide and Disk Setup Manual.

Getting and installing OpenBSD/i386:

The latest supported OpenBSD/i386 release is OpenBSD 7.3. Here are the OpenBSD/i386 installation instructions.

Snapshots are made available from time to time, in this location as well as on a few mirrors. Here are the OpenBSD/i386 snapshot installation instructions as well.

There are several installation media provided:

• CD image (install73.iso)
  The CD ISO provides an El Torito no-emulation boot image that includes almost all OpenBSD drivers. This also includes minimal USB support (storage devices and keyboard).
  For the latest list of drivers available on this image, take a look at the RAMDISK_CD kernel configuration file.
• Disk image (miniroot73.img)
  The same installer as the CD ISO, but in a form suitable for creating bootable hard drives or USB flash drives.
• Floppy (floppy73.img)
  This 1.44MB floppy image contains the most common drivers. It is designed to cover the most typical PC. As a general rule, you will find that the missing drivers are ones which need large microcodes to run, such as for rare SCSI cards, gigabit ethernet cards, or RAID devices.
  For the latest list of drivers available on this image, take a look at the RAMDISK kernel configuration file.