Hacker News Reader

bryneton The perils of transition to 64-bit time_t

No, time_t is a signed 64-bit type on all architectures, 64-bit architectures have no "32bit compat".

https://www.openbsd.org/55.html

bryneton Warning: DNS encryption in Little Snitch 6.1 may occasionally fail

> getaddrinfo() is the way to resolve names on Linux and I suspect the *BSDs.

At least on OpenBSD, all classical/standard DNS functions (getaddrinfo/gethostbyname/...) are wrappers around OpenBSD's libc asr implementation, written by Eric Faurot.

https://man.openbsd.org/man3/asr_run.3

https://github.com/openbsd/src/tree/master/lib/libc/asr

bryneton We have reached OpenBSD of Theseus

It's a BSD game.

https://man.openbsd.org/quiz

bryneton Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON (2022)

I don't think very many of the LEXICON servers or disks survived, but I hope someone somewhere still has them, but might be lost to time.

bryneton Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON (2022)

After heavy criticism for a decade, the government ceased all support for the ICON in 1994 and ordered all ICON hardware to be sent to landfill and software to be destroyed.

This is a sad part of history, I vividly remember hearing this had happened. Growing up in Ontario with computer labs full of these up until the mid to late 90's, graph paper hanging on the walls with LOGO programs, and games, so many games (Oregon trail, Cross Country Canada), and then they started getting replaced with PC's in classrooms. I remember missing a local auction or something that had a bunch of these Burroughs (later Unisys) ICONs for $5/$10, but without the LEXICON server they were functionally useless, I still regret not picking one up.

Always happy whenever someone else remembers them.

bryneton Re: Do people IRL know you have a blog?

Non-alcoholic. I don't drink. :-)

bryneton Re: Do people IRL know you have a blog?

I showed my Mom my personal website a few years ago, and her only comment was it needed more pictures, so I added a picture of a window plant to exactly one page. I haven't showed it to anyone else IRL.

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

bryneton July 2024 Update on Instability Reports on Intel Core 13th/14th Gen Desktop CPUs

Curious why Intel announced this on their community forums, rather than somewhere more official.

bryneton Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on?

OpenBSD. Good people, consistent style, correctness.

bryneton OpenBSD added initial support for Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X after 1 day

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40738733

bryneton OpenBSD added initial support for Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X after 1 day

Patrick shared an early dmesg showing OpenBSD booting on the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7, for those curious about the hardware and driver support so far.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=171883671113138&w=2

bryneton Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite minimal support (OpenBSD)

dmesg:

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=171883671113138&w=2

bryneton Wall of Pizza

Made a few years ago as a fun way of doing a donations page and a way to thank those who supported my open source slacking with the delicious gift of pizza.

bryneton Possible firmware issues for Apple Silicon OpenBSD/ARM64 users

The script is running on macOS and is what the Asahi project recommends when updating or installing m1n1/Linux:

https://asahilinux.org/

It's called out in the OpenBSD/arm64 installation notes, at least:

https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/arm64/INSTALL....

Search for "Install on Apple Silicon".

bryneton Possible firmware issues for Apple Silicon OpenBSD/ARM64 users

An OpenBSD developer has since very early on contributed to m1n1 and the u-boot port, which is also shared by Linux.

https://asahilinux.org/about/#who-is-working-on-asahi-linux

Booting OpenBSD on a Apple silicon Mac requires:

• macOS + m1n1 stage 1 (from the Asahi Linux project)

• m1n1 stage 2 + u-boot (from OpenBSD)

• OpenBSD's EFI bootloader (BOOTAA64.EFI).

A recent macOS update exposed a bug in m1n1 which has been fixed and pushed out by both the Asahi Linux team, and now also OpenBSD.

bryneton MacRelix – Unix-like features for classic Mac OS

Quite some years ago I did a bit of digital archeology and put the 68k MacMinix 1.5 release source on GitHub, sadly the original file dates weren't preserved in the distribution image.

They were archived using tar(1) to dump the files to a floppy disk on a PowerBook 150 running MacMinix. I don't know why I did that. :-)

https://github.com/macminix/MacMinix

bryneton OpenBSD 7.5

> ARM64 has execute-only support so that it's possible for code to execute, but not read, a text segment.

OpenBSD does xonly by default on multiple architectures (arm64, risc-v, ... g5 powerpc), including even amd64 on recent Intel/AMD CPUs supporting MPK/PKU:

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=167423045918820&w=2

On machines that lack hardware-enforcement, at least on CPUs that can differentiate between traps for instruction-fetch and data-fetch, there is still benefit:

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=167517831914525&w=2 (msyscall(2) part is now handled by pinsyscalls in -current)

bryneton Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

chatgpt(8). It's pretty useless.

https://brynet.ca/chatgpt/

bryneton OpenBSD 7.5

Announcement mail: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=171228270018970&w=2

bryneton New code for SIGILL faults to help identify misbranches on OpenBSD

> I'm not sure if this patch is noteworthy on its own, but perhaps it was posted because it implies this CPU feature is now supported or soon to be supported by OpenBSD.

OpenBSD has supported mandatory BTI/IBT on Intel CPUs (11th Gen+) and arm64 (Apple M2) since 7.4 (Oct 16, 2023).

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

"Mandatory enforcement of indirect branch targets (BTI on arm64, IBT on Intel amd64), unless a linker flag (-Wl,-z,nobtcfi) requests no enforcement."

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=168899645126958&w=2

OpenBSD recently disabled retpolines by default because they are incompatible with IBT, so there has been some work done recently that this patch could help with, e.g: adding missing indirect branch target instructions (endbr64), previously hidden by retpoline. OpenBSD has done a lot of work to push these changes into the entire software ecosystem.

bryneton OpenBSD System-Call Pinning

> Lots of people have adopted something like this;

Really? And how many systems have made any effort to use it, on OpenBSD most of a programs static address space is now automatically immutable (main program .text, ld.so .text, .bss, main stack, dymamically-loaded shared libraries, and dlopen()'d libraries mapped w/ RTLD_NODELETE.

Nobody else have done the work on a complete operating system.

bryneton OpenBSD System-Call Pinning

Library relinking, mimmutable(2), xonly, along with other recent developments such as the removal of indirect syscall(2), make syscall pinning all the more interesting, and raise the bar against attackers significantly.

One can only hope that more will eventually find its way into Linux, like with how paid employees at Google have been spending the past ~6 months cloning mimmutable (which HN characters decried as "useless") to make mseal() for defending Chrome.

https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&w=2&r=1&s=mseal&q=b

bryneton Google Chrome goes native for Windows on Arm

I'm not aware of anything that depends on the SecureBoot status of a device, except possibly Widevine DRM for video streaming, but I don't see how that would be unique to ARM, disabling SecureBoot is also usually required on x86 for running alternative OSes without Microsoft's signed shim bootloader.

There is no Widevine support for OpenBSD anyway, so it's never been possible to watch Netflix. Fortunately, there are solutions for that...

Incidentally, Fedora Asahi Linux for Apple Silicon (ARM) got Widevine (hence, Netflix) working without any form of SecureBoot, they wrote about it recently on their blog.

bryneton Google Chrome goes native for Windows on Arm

All WoA (Windows 10/11 on ARM) devices based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7/8cx Gen 3 seem to allow disabling UEFI SecureBoot, AFAIK earlier SoCs did as well.

OpenBSD/arm64 runs on the Microsoft Dev Kit 2023 and Lenovo ThinkPad x13s machines, out of the box. OpenBSD supported booting/installing on these even before Linux, although Linux support has improved.

https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html

bryneton John Lasseter drew the BSD daemon logo

"Puffy vs Cthulhu" is also pretty badass.

https://www.openbsd.org/images/puffy_vs_cthulhu.jpg

https://twitter.com/natazilla/status/1138473365969264643

bryneton John Lasseter drew the BSD daemon logo

They also designed probably the best t-shirt art for an OS release, no longer available, sadly.

https://www.openbsd.org/tshirts.html#47

https://twitter.com/natazilla/status/1187896621045956608

bryneton OpenBSD KDE Plasma Desktop

The kde-plasma and kde-plasma-extras packages are available in -current aarch64 packages, perhaps you can test it?

bryneton OpenBSD KDE Plasma Desktop

There is experimental support for Wayland/sway in OpenBSD -current, with lots of recent ports activity.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=170176226313427&w=2

bryneton BCHS software stack: BSD, C, httpd, SQLite

OpenBSD maintained several local patches to nginx, such as chroot [0] by default and reallocarray fixes, but it was rejected by the upstream and too big to maintain locally.

OpenBSD httpd would probably have never existed if nginx upstream reacted differently.

https://www.openbsd.org/papers/httpd-slides-asiabsdcon2015.p...

[0] The OpenBSD nginx port still includes the default chroot patch, ~8 years later, see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sthen/nginx_chroot_patch/a... and https://github.com/openbsd/ports/blob/master/www/nginx/Makef...