OpenBSD on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 9th Gen

Last update: $Id: x1carbon.md,v 1.1 2026/01/11 14:23:34 cvs Exp $

Since an unfortunate accident on the Dutch hacker camp SHA I always travel with a secondary laptop and my primary laptops stays safe at home. Back then, I put my Laptop on an inflatable sofa on the campground and someone took a seat on the rear end of the sofa. My Thinkpad got a fine 9.8 on the judge’s scale, performed a double somersault and ended up with a cracked display.

Until recently, my travel laptop was a Thinkpad X250 running OpenBSD -current. In the last month, the ghost in the machine started to insert random characters at random times. While it is annoying, you can easily fix this when being in an editor or on the command line. Typing your full disc encryption password unsuccessful for the 5th time because of random characters gets annoying really fast.

Thus, I needed a new device. As usual, I prefer used laptops for this job since it’s more environment friendly to buy a used device and buying a brand new laptop for travel and event is a waste of money for me. Meet the new member of my Thinkpad family, a X1 Carbon 9th Gen.

Travel laptop as target to test backup restores

As with my primary laptop, it runs on OpenBSD -current. The big benefit for me is that I only need to perform the installation of the base system, all other data is restored from my OpenBSD time machine backup. After restore, my travel laptop is an exact copy of the primary one. This is not only very convenient, it also ensures that I regularly test the restore procedure of my backup process. Another, non-obvious, benefit is that in case of a failure of my primary laptop (which already happened to me once), I have a working replacement up and running in a matter of minutes.

Hardware

The used model I bought has an 11th Gen Intel i7 CPU with four CPU cores. The associated graphics card is an Iris XE card on the same chip. RAM is 32 GB as one, non-removable module. Which is fine for me since that’s the maximum that can be used in this device.

The screen is 14” in the usual, good Thinkpad quality. Compared to my Tuxedo InfinityBook, the bezel feels good and doesn’t wooble if you touch it accidentally. The resolution is 1920x1200.

Port wise, the device has 2 USB-C, 2 USB-A, one HDMI and one Kesington lock port. The USB-C ports can be used for charging and one of them can be configured in the BIOS as always-on port to charge other devices.

In normal operations, the fan is silent. If I do some heavy lifting in vmm, it gets quite loud. However, that’s somehow expected and in the range of my other devices.

Current OpenBSD Support Summary

Status is relative to OpenBSD-current as of 2026-01-12. Here is the dmesg.

The following table is modelled after the tables in the articles of OpenBSD developer jcs@.