The SSD does not support NCQ TRIM. But it supports TRIM. If you do not switch off NCQ during the installation the data written on the disk will be corrupted and the installation will fail. Therefore before booting the kernel at the loader prompt type

kern.cam.ada.0.quirks="0x2"

to switch off NCQ for the SSD. Be careful to do this everytime you boot the installation medium.

After the installation before rebooting open a shell in the freshly installed system and put the line above into /boot/loader.conf. Otherwise your installed system will be corrupted sooner or later after you boot into it.

Be sure that /boot/device.hints contains

hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled="1"
hint.p4tcc.0.disabled="1"

Add the lines if they are not there.

For power saving of the graphics card and the sound system and of PCI devices for which there is no driver add

drm.i915.enable_rc6=7
hw.snd.latency=7
hw.pci.do_power_nodriver=3

to /boot/loader.conf.

And finally activate powerd in /etc/rc.conf:

powerd_enable="YES"
economy_cx_lowest="Cmax"
performance_cx_lowest="Cmax"

It is vital that the graphics drivers are not loaded during boot but by adding them to the kld_list in /etc/rc.conf:

kld_list+=' drm2 i915kms'

I experienced failures of powerd if I did otherwise; the power consumption when running on battery never dropped below 14 W if the boot loader loaded the modules. If they were loaded later I got between 9 W and 10 W of power consumption.

Network failover mode is achieved by configuring the lagg interface. The built in wifi card uses the iwm driver. Apparently either the driver or the card does not like if its ethernet address is changed. The connection to the network cannot be established. So the ethernet interface of the network card has to be changed.

The following lines in /etc/rc.conf produce a working failover configuration of the wifi and the network card.

ifconfig_em0="up"
ifconfig_emo_alias0="ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx"
wlans_iwm0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA" cloned_interfaces="lagg0"
ifconfig_lagg0="laggproto failover laggport em0 laggport wlan0 DHCP"

xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx stands for the ethernet address of the wifi card. It can be found with ifconfig. Comment out the second and the last two lines above and restart the system. ifconfig will show you the ethernet address of wlan0.

Works mostly. If you suspend while the first terminal is active the screen stays black. Just switch to any of the other terminals and back and the screen will light up again.

Sometimes after resume no keyboard input is possible and the mouse pointer does not react. I think this is a problem with the graphics driver module i915kms. Maybe this will be resolved in future versions.

Suspend/Resume does not require a reset of the video stack. Therefore set it to 0 in /boot/loader.conf

hw.acpi.reset_video="0"

which is the default anyway.

Some keys with blue symbols are sent by the keyboard and some by ACPI. Therefore I wrote the kernel module acpi_dell_wmi and kbdmxe which is a modified version of kbdmux. Just say make in each directory of the modules and copy the resulting .ko files to /boot/modules/.

Load the modules in the usual way by adding either

kbdmxe_load="YES" acpi_dell_wmi_load="YES"

to /boot/loader.conf or by adding the line

kld_list+=' kbdmxe acpi_dell_wmi'

to /etc/rc.conf.

kbdmux and kbdmxe do not play well together as they use the same resources. So deactivate kbdmux by putting the following line into /boot/device.hints

hint.kbdmux.0.disabled="1"

To activate kbdmxe copy the file kbdmxe from the rc.d directory in this repository to /usr/local/etc/rc.d. And activate the script in /etc/rc.conf with the line

kbdmxe_enable="YES"

To be able to control the LCD brightness we need the functionality of the kernel module acpi_video. Unfortunately it reacts on the brightness keys by itself in a strange way. Apparently it cannot determine the correct table of the display brightnesses. Therefore there is an altered version acpi_video_dell in this repository which you should build and copy to /boot/modules/ and load it in the usual way with

acpi_video_dell_load="YES"

in /boot/loader.conf or by adding the module to the list in /etc/rc.conf

kld_list+=' acpi_video_dell"

An example of how devd can be configure to react on the various notifications delivered by kbdmxe and acpi_dell_wmi is shown in the file dell.conf in the devd directory of this repository. Just copy the file to /usr/local/etc/dev/ and also the directory control-tools/ to /usr/local/libexec/.

This example requires intel_backlight to be installed and musicpd to be installed and configured.

Finally here is the table with the associations of the keys on the keyboard and the notifications delivered to devd:

             | ACPI   | DELL      | EVENT | KBBLOFF | keyboard backlight is off
             | ACPI   | DELL      | EVENT | KBBLLV1 | keyboard backlight at level 1
             | ACPI   | DELL      | EVENT | KBBLLV2 | keyboard backlight at level 2
             | ACPI   | DELL      | EVENT | KBBLLV3 | keyboard backlight at level 3
             | ACPI   | DELL      | EVENT | KBBLLV4 | keyboard backlight at level 4

<Fn> + <F5> | KBD | KBDMXE | KEY | TPDTOGL | switch the touchpad on or off <Fn> + <F8> | KBD | KBDMXE | KEY | DSPSELN | select next display configuration <WIN> + P | KBD | KBDMXE | KEY | DSPSELN | select next display configuration <Fn> + <F10> | KBD | KBDMXE | KEY | BACK | select previous track <Fn> + <F11> | KBD | KBDMXE | KEY | PLYTOGL | play or pause the current track <Fn> + <F12> | KBD | KBDMXE | KEY | FORWARD | select next track <VOL MUTE> | KBD | KBDMXE | KEY | VOLMUTE | mute the volume <VOL UP> | KBD | KBDMXE | KEY | VOLUP | increase the volume <VOL DOWN> | KBD | KBDMXE | KEY | VOLDOWN | decrease the volume

Note that there are keys that do not have a description. They apparently do not have a predefined meaning. I use some of them to blank the screen or switch the wifi off.

Also there are the notifications about the state of the keyboard backlight brightness. An implementation of an OSD display might use these, for example.