OpenBSD hardware compatibility

is OBSD compatible with cutting edge hardware that is out right now?

 

In short... Somewhat. Don't expect cutting-edge features to work properly. (And don't expect 3D acceleration to work at all; on some chipsets X will eventually crash if you don't turn it off.)

However, OpenBSD 5 has much better hardware compatibility than older versions; e.g. it seems to support PnP well enough that it can see my laptop's ethernet card when ACPI is enabled.

 

What do you mean by cutting edge? Any processor, ethernet, hard driver, motherboard, RAM, etc. then yes. Video cards is another matter. No 3D support for Nvidia cards (no nvidia provided driver for OpenBSD), limited 3D support for ATI (older cards), and recently support for 2D acceleration for Sandy-bridge intel cards. The best way to see what works is honestly just to boot the install cd (no need to install), drop to shell, read the dmesg, and see what gets detected.

 

Ethernet not necessarily. Until version 5.0 there were for instance ethernet cards that wouldn't work unless ACPI was disabled.

 

Whch ones?

 

The Marvell 88E8038 for starters, and I've seen reports of other cards having the same issue. Though IIRC it may depend on the machine's BIOS.

 

http://openbsd.org/plat.html

 

Which driver does it use?

 

Uses the msk driver, IIRC.