Hacker News Reader

bryneton Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

Making rent as an open source developer.

Attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my crappy HTML skills.

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

bryneton Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

Making rent as an open source developer.

Attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my crappy HTML skills.

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

bryneton Ask HN: What open source projects are you grateful for?

With my OpenBSD developer hat on, I'll say we're grateful for hardware donations (from new laptops, to esoteric networking gear, etc.)

https://www.openbsd.org/want.html

Also the OpenBSD foundation is ~5% away from its fundraising goal for 2025! :-)

https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2025.html

bryneton Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

I guess mine is more blog-lite? It's a mix of microblogging (an embedded view of the rss feed for my mastodon) as well as some static-HTML blog articles below that.

https://brynet.ca/

https://brynet.ca/article-x395.html

bryneton Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

Making rent as an open source developer.

Attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my crappy HTML skills.

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

bryneton OpenBSD 7.8 Highlights

For anyone interested in digging in further, I posted some OpenBSD 7.8 highlights over on Mastodon as well.

https://bsd.network/@brynet/115403567146395679

bryneton OpenBSD 7.8

Unfortunately no, I don't. At the very least we'll likely need to wait for support in Asahi Linux which provides for us the m1n1 bootloader, device trees, etc., as a first-stage.

bryneton OpenBSD 7.8

Yeah, after this was ported to OpenBSD by kn@ earlier this year. I just found the combination to be silly, booting OpenBSD on an Apple Silicon Mac to run a Win95 themed DE with the classic Windows 95 startup sound, it does require some tweaking. I also followed the instructions on the GitHub project page.

> How do I send you pizza (from one of the good places)?

You certainly don't have to, but I appreciate it!

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

bryneton OpenBSD 7.8

Yes, OpenBSD/arm64 runs on M1/M2 machines.

bryneton OpenBSD 7.8

wifi works, it's bwfm(4).

bryneton OpenBSD 7.8

> Chicago95

I did a thing. :-)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brynet_openbsd-activity-73074...

bryneton OpenBSD 7.8

OpenBSD 7.8 release artwork by "Apsephion"

https://www.openbsd.org/images/Terraodontidae.png

https://www.openbsd.org/images/puffy78.gif

https://www.openbsd.org/78.html

bryneton Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

Making rent as an open source developer.

Attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my crappy HTML skills.

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

bryneton The QNX Operating System

I used ICONs in school growing up in Ontario, Canada, they were so cool. It was a sad day when Windows PCs replaced them in the computer lab.

All but a few of these computers were destroyed by the ministry of education. And without the LEXICON server that accompanied them, they're basically useless.

For a bit of fun, I ran the DOOM shareware demo using the official QNX4 port on a 486SX with 8M of ram.

https://brynet.ca/video-qnxdoom.html

I picked up QNX6 again as a hobbyist later in life... until self-hosted QNX was killed, no bootable .ISOs after 6.5. Then they killed the hobbyist license, killed the Photon desktop GUI, dropped any native toolchain support in place of a Windows/Linux-hosted IDE. Porting software became difficult, pkgsrc no longer maintained.

They are completely noncommittal as a company, nothing short of actually open-sourcing it under the MIT/BSD would convince me to use it again.. and not another source-available effort that they inevitably rug pull again.

https://www.osnews.com/story/23565/qnx6-is-closed-source-onc...

bryneton Walmart U.S. moves to eliminate synthetic dyes across all private brand foods

Not that I'm aware of.. The product I tested was after 2017 is still advertised here in Canada with natural colours, made with fruit juices.

The US parent company is also committing to it as well.

https://www.wkkellogg.com/our-impact/make-eating-well-easy/q...

bryneton Walmart U.S. moves to eliminate synthetic dyes across all private brand foods

I participated in some consumer testing when Kellogg's Canada was switching their breakfast cereals to natural colours. Beyond some muted colours, the cereal tasted exactly the same. Seemed like a no brainer, really.

bryneton Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)

Making rent as an open source developer.

Attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my poor HTML skills.

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

bryneton Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2025)?

Making rent as an open source developer.

Attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my poor HTML skills.

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

bryneton Snapdragon X2 Elite ARM Laptop CPU

> "The platform is capable of booting kernel at EL2 with kvm-unit tests performed on it for sanity."

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250925-v3_glymur_introduction...

EL2 support is huge, means virtualization will work on non-Windows OSes (e.g: Linux KVM), unlike with previous gen.

bryneton Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years?

Longer than two years, for pre-COVID reasons mostly. Not coping too well..

It sure would be nice if one of those bitcoin millionaires came out of nowhere willing to sponsor me. I'd love to focus on open source, without worrying about making rent or eating this month.

Shameless self-promotion, sorry..

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

bryneton AMD Turin PSP binaries analysis from open-source firmware perspective

He's the founder of the company, looks like he's just hyping up his engineers blog post? Not everything is AI.

bryneton Unofficial Windows 11 requirements bypass tool allows disabling all AI features

What's interesting is that the syscall-compatibility layers in the BSDs began with SunOS binary compat on NetBSD m68k/32-bit sparc-- which was created by Theo de Raadt.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2

https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/6ce3f21

https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/1a68594

He also came to the same conclusion compat layers were a dead end (OpenBSD removed all compat_*(8) support, including Linux).

bryneton Raspberry Pi 5 support (OpenBSD)

Not true, CPU frequency scaling (apmd, cpu.setperf/perfpolicy) is supported on many ARM machines, including the ThinkPad X13s, Apple M1/M2 Silicon, Raspberry Pi 4 (but may depend on whether using EDK2 or U-Boot firmware).

Support for Snapdragon X Elite machines was added as recently as last month, even..

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=175395733802655&w=2

bryneton Raspberry Pi 5 support (OpenBSD)

NVMe hats work in OpenBSD, it's NVMe boot that doesn't work at present. It still needs support added to the U-Boot firmware, which OpenBSD uses here. Raspbian and other Linux distros are typically booted differently on this hardware (Linux kernel image is loaded directly by the GPU, not joking.)

Also, Wi-Fi is supported on some Raspberry Pi 5 models, with the bwfm(4) Broadcom driver. It's just the later D0 hardware stepping that doesn't, C1 works fine.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=175526487704135&w=2

I believe Ethernet may also be working via the cad(4)/Cadence driver, but I don't have the hardware to test it.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=175561863928051&w=2

bryneton Laptop Support and Usability (LSU): July 2025 Report

Yes, AFAIK it depends on the machine, on Intel at least there's debug output printed in the dmesg that should show if/how long it stays in different power states.

I think there is still work ongoing to improve battery life.

bryneton Laptop Support and Usability (LSU): July 2025 Report

OpenBSD's had suspend-to-idle (S0i) aka "modern standby" since 7.6 (2024), at least on Intel. 7.8 will have better AMD support.

bryneton Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

Hah, I remember them sharing that on mastodon. Happy to inspire more pizza pages. :-)

bryneton Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

Making rent as an open source developer.

Attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my really bad HTML skills.

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

bryneton Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

Ideally, making rent as an open source developer.. any help appreciated. :-)

bryneton What motivates you to contribute to open source projects?

I'm food motivated.. so pizza. :-)

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html