On Sat, May 10, 2025 at 07:41:30AM -0600, Maximo Pech wrote: > OpenBSD is really flexible, can be installed on very small systems or big > systems. I’d say the requirements depend on what you want to do with it. In > practice as long as your cpu is supported, it doesn’t matter to the OS how > much memory or disk space there is, it will run. > > Just experiment with it. > > Having said that, for me on amd64 the minimum is around 2Gb disk space, 4.5 > if I want to be able to perform sysupgrades, and around 1-2 Gb of memory. > But that’s based on my personal use cases, preferences and experience.
I think what Maximo says here is good advice. More likely than not, whatever you have lying around as spare hardware will exceed the known minimum requirements for getting OpenBSD up and running. You can expect things to work, with two caveats: 1) there is a chance that you encounter hardware that requires firmware that for license reasons is not included in the OpenBSD install sets (but in most cases that will be a simple fw_update away) 2) no Bluetooth support (although some devices can be made to cooperate, see the mailing list archives) What the actual minimum requirements are will vary among the 14 supported architectures, but for my part the skinniest config I have running is an arm64 VM that is configured with 4GB RAM, where a freshly sysupgraded -current with no packages installed gives med the following df -h output: armedpuffy$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/sd0a 986M 100M 836M 11% / /dev/sd0l 21.3G 28.0K 20.2G 1% /home /dev/sd0d 3.9G 10.0K 3.7G 1% /tmp /dev/sd0f 6.5G 1.3G 4.9G 21% /usr /dev/sd0g 986M 281M 655M 31% /usr/X11R6 /dev/sd0h 8.6G 3.4M 8.2G 1% /usr/local /dev/sd0k 5.8G 2.0K 5.5G 1% /usr/obj /dev/sd0j 2.9G 2.0K 2.8G 1% /usr/src /dev/sd0e 6.7G 9.2M 6.3G 1% /var That said, my advice is much like Maximo's: Go ahead, play and experiment! Running on faster hardware with more memory and storage will generally give a better experience, but you grab what you have and run with it! All the best, Peter -- Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team https://bsdly.blogspot.com/ https://www.bsdly.net/ https://www.nuug.no/ "Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic" delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.
