benzblog

MCP bad?

Mon, 25 May 2026 11:05:19 +0200

A while ago, I made an off-hand remark that got some followup questions. I said that in AI applications, Model Context Protocol (MCP) is no longer a favored extension model for tools. The question was essentially – Really? What to use instead?

What is the problem with MCP?

MCP is a chatty protocol. Connecting to any MCP endpoint will hand the AI model a full description of all the possible calls, including some explanatory text and parameters.

It's not Track 9 3/4

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:38:34 +0100

I recently spent a week in London, as one does. As I walked through the King’s Cross train station, it struck me: if anything, it should be track 8 3/4 and not 9 3/4. Let me explain.

In case you have been living under a rock: in the Harry Potter book series, the protagonists run through a wall to reach the “hidden” platform 9 3/4, where the Hogwarts Express departs.

Rust in the Kernel, and other odd decisions

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:19:28 +0100

My email inbox is like the pile of documents on my desk. Things that I wanted to get back to ends up moving towards the bottom, into the never-ending pile of … stuff. For the first time in a while, I have looked at the bottom – and found an inquiry from someone who had seen my presentation at FOSDEM 2024.

They had a question for me, which I am going to paraphrase below. I am going to reproduce my answer here because it may be interesting for others.

San Francisco, 2025

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 17:01:14 +0100

Last week, I visited the Bay Area for a business trip. Most of my time was spent in the South Bay, but I also spent a day in SF.

In the afternoon, I went to Ocean beach and dipped my feet in the Pacific Ocean for a tiny bit. The water was pretty cold! Where I live, we have beautiful landscapes but the country is landlocked, so going to ocean shore is special for me.

Booting NetBSD from a wedge, the hard way

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 09:49:34 +0200

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 with NetBSD 10, running CI jobs. Because SD cards are notoriously unreliable, I attached a USB hard drive to it. The HDD has a swap partition and scratch space for the builds, while root is on the SD. Unfortunately, some writes end up going to the root file system after all, which meant that the SD card was destroyed after only about a year!

Some nuanced thoughts on AI

Sun, 04 May 2025 16:51:02 +0200

I have stuggled with writing this for a while. This has the potential to be controversial: Some people have very strong opinions on this, while my own opinion is more … nuanced. –

I live in two different worlds regarding AI.

During the day, I am working in a big tech company that is betting big on AI. AI is everywhere, and (at least some) people are excited about the possibilities.

Developing pkgsrc with git

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 17:13:42 +0100

I stopped developing pkgsrc with CVS.

Quick bit of background: NetBSD is still using CVS as its version control system. The decision to move to something else has been taken long ago, but the switch has not happened as of today.

Working with CVS is painful for many reasons. For instance, there is no way to see your local changes without waiting several minutes for a cvs up -n. A full tree update (cvs up) churns for quite a while before it even starts updating any files.

"Founder Mode"

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 21:46:45 +0100

My current work project started last summer, as a bit of experimentation. A few of us sat together in a room and started writing down a hypothetical piece of configuration. Within less than a week, we had actually written a prototype-quality piece of software accepting exactly the configuration we had brainstormed.

A few months later however, this project went through a difficult phase where we realized that we actually needed to write down a plan for bringing the software to a stable, usable state. This ended up a painful couple of weeks of planning ahead and realizing that our goal of shipping this was slipping.

Tracking Bulk Builds in pkgsrc: from Cloud to NetBSD Native

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 15:30:00 +0100

Emulating *BSD on ARM, Part 3: OpenBSD

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 11:41:28 +0100

This is part 3 of my blog post series about emulating BSD operating systems for 32-bit ARM with QEMU. Buckle up, today we will need to do an actual OS installation!

In OpenBSD/armv7, the miniroot image is an installer, so we also need a new empty drive image to install to. I recommend the qcow2 format, since it consumes only the space that is actually occupied. The 10G image created below is only 192 kilobytes initially. Here is how you create the root image:

Emulating *BSD on ARM, Part 2: FreeBSD

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 20:52:35 +0100

In Part 1 of this blog post series, I explained how I recently spent some time getting various BSD OSes to run on QEMU, for 32-bit ARM (ARMv7). This part deals with FreeBSD.

Spoiler: it was easier than the others.

I started by downloading an image from https://download.freebsd.org/releases/arm/armv7/ISO-IMAGES/. Mine was called FreeBSD-14.1-RELEASE-arm-armv7-GENERICSD.img.xz.

Preparing UEFI

Warner Losh has thankfully written a blog post about how to get it running in QEMU, which we are going to follow.

Emulating *BSD on ARM, Part 1: Introduction

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 20:30:07 +0200

In my copious spare time, I maintain the Go CI system for certain platforms. These days, Go uses LUCI, the same CI pipeline that Chromium is using.

My current rabbit hole is making the “swarming bot” work on NetBSD/arm – that’s 32-bit ARM, not aarch64. When building Go code for 32-bit ARM, the GOARM environment variable can be set to the instruction set version, i.e. GOARM=6 (ARMv6, the default) and GOARM=7 (ARMv7). One of the things that ARMv7 has that v6 doesn’t is atomic synchronisation instructions. At least on BSD systems, Go needs those for multi-core systems (which is more or less all systems these days). Thus, ARMv6 Go binaries exit on startup if run on a system with multiple cores.

NetBSD 10 -- 30 Jahre und immer noch da

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 17:49:46 +0100

The code is not enough

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 11:46:46 +0200

In my job, I read a lot of code. I read more code than I write. I suppose that’s true for many engineers at the senior level or above.

For instance, a new piece of code integrates with a library, or with another code base, and I want to understand how the integration works. Or I am the supplier of the infrastructure/library/framework and I need to debug someone’s (mis-)use.

Why does this not compile?
Why does it compile but then crashes on startup with a cryptic error message?
Why does it seem to work but then all requests return the same error?

Configuration

Code is nothing without the corresponding configuration, particularly when you are looking at builds or deployments.

Fedora Update: btrfs self-destruct

Tue, 07 May 2024 22:21:21 +0200

A while ago, I installed Fedora Asahi Remix on my M2 MacBook Air, and I was very positive about it. So positive, in fact, that I ended up making it the default partition in the bootloader. I haven’t used macOS in weeks. But then, a few days ago, something weird happened:

In the middle of some development work, running cvs update on the pkgsrc repository, the screen suddenly filled with a bunch of “read-only file system” errors. It turned out that both / and /home had remounted themselves read-only, without my intervention.

The XZ Backdoor

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 20:32:45 +0200

Over the Easter weekend 2024, there was a big kerfuffle around a compression tool named xz. Honestly, the story is so amazing that it could be a gripping novel. In fact, what happened is not dissimilar to the book $ git commit murder My Michael Warren Lucas.

A PostgreSQL developer, Andres Freund, was running some benchmarks and trying to reduce the noise from other programs on the system. While doing so, he noticed that sshd would take more CPU than expected during logins, for about 0.5 seconds at a time.

Fedora Asahi Remix

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 10:21:03 +0100

I have been following Asahi Linux for a while. Linux for my MacBook Air M2 – sure, why not? But I wasn’t particularly interested in a distribution based on Arch Linux.

In late 2023, the Asahi folks presented a new distro that they called Fedora Asahi Remix. The promise is to combine the ground-breaking Kernel development of Asahi with the polish of Fedora Linux. I thought I would give it a go.

NetBSD 10: Thirty Years, Still Going Strong!

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0200

In 2023, the NetBSD project celebrated 30 years since its first release, 0.8. Now, four years after NetBSD 9, NetBSD 10 brings a huge number of changes and improvements. This talk will dive into the most important new features of NetBSD 10, such as performance and security improvements, expanded CPU and GPU support, improved virtualization and more!

Another strength of NetBSD is its package system, pkgsrc, which is portable to dozens of other OSes and can even be used like virtualenv for development and deployment environments.

The VS Code Flatpak is useless

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 18:47:30 +0100

I installed Fedora 39 the other day. (More on that in one of the next posts.) It has a nifty software installer thing named “Discover”. When I typed “Visual Studio Code” into the search box, it dutifully installed VS Code. As a Flatpak.

This was the first time I interacted with Flatpak, and it did not go well.

Aside: Why VS Code

I want to use VS Code for editing Go code, with gopls, since it provides a really good integration. It turns out that a majority of Go developers use VS Code, so the language server integration is well tested and complete. In short, it’s the well-lit path.

Building a NetBSD ramdisk kernel

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 15:08:37 +0100

When I used OpenBSD, I was a big fan of bsd.rd: a kernel that includes a root file system with an installer and a few tools. When I invariably did something bad to my root file system, I could use that to repair things. bsd.rd is also helpful for OS updates. And there is only a single file involved.

On NetBSD however, there is usually no netbsd.rd kernel installed, or even available by default. The facility is there, it’s just not standard. To be fair, there are a number of architectures that use kernels with a ramdisk for installation.

Talk about the Basics

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 21:23:20 +0200

Whenever I send around a Call for Papers for an open source conference, some people reply something like

Unfortunately, I don’t have anything to present right now. My work on XYZ is simply not far enough along.

Or similar. However, this does not matter.

I’ll let you in on a secret: When I was in academia, when someone was talking about their results at a conference, I mostly did not give a shit about the results themselves. (Unless I was working on something narrowly related, which was rare.)

pkgsrc statt Containern!

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 17:37:10 +0200

1.

Es gibt da dieses Betriebssystem, und es ist nicht Linux.

NetBSD.

NetBSD besteht nicht nur aus einem Kernel, sondern aus einem Basissystem, in dem auch eine Shell, ein Compiler, der X-Server, usw. ist. Aber zum Beispiel kein Firefox.

Was mache ich jetzt, wenn ich aber Firefox installieren möchte?

Dafür gibt es pkgsrc, gesprochen „package source“. Wie der Name schon sagt, ist es eine Sammlung von Quellpaketen, also Rezepten, um Software aus dem Quelltext zu bauen.

Culture is about the small things

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 11:43:00 +0100

I have lived outside the country I was born in for more than 17 years now.

When I lived in France, I eventually had a pretty good grasp of the language. I could give tech talks, write reports, talk to my coworkers, neighbours and friends — including casual banter and that sort of thing. I like to think that I actually fit in pretty well.

However, one evening I watched Qui veut gagner des millons? on TV, the French edition of Who wants to be a Millionaire. And I realized that I would not even be able to get through the initial round of quick-fire questions. Most of the time, I did not know the answer to the 500 euro question! The reason for that is that these questions rely on shared cultural understandings, such as that TV series everyone watched when they were a kid, popular books and snacks and the like. I grew up with different series. I have not watched many of the movies that “everyone” remembers from way back when, such as La cité de la peur or Le Père-Noël est une ordure. La classe Américaine was excellent though :)

Operating Systems, Transit and Cultural Influences

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 11:50:15 +0200

All of the dominant commercial operating systems in desktop and mobile computing — macOS, iOS, Windows, Android, Chrome OS — are made in the US, on the West Coast. Except for Microsoft, they are heavily concentrated in the SF Bay Area. (Note that I am not talking about free software such as GNU/Linux, BSD, etc., which is probably more diverse regarding the location of their developers.)

Flight Tracking

All of these OSes are very eager to support you with flight tickets and boarding passes. For instance, you can add your boarding pass to Apple Wallet, or Google Wallet, and it will automatically surface when you are at the airport. Very convenient!

On Meetings

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 21:17:45 +0200

I recently made two LinkedIn posts about meetings. I thought it would make sense to reproduce them here for posterity.

Normalize ending meetings early.

If you have scheduled a 1-hour meeting but you are done with your agenda after 30 minutes, there is no need to scramble to think about more things to say. No one will judge you (hopefully) if you just end the meeting at that point and make a more productive use of the remaining time.

Using Lua from Go

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 14:51:03 +0100

Last weekend, at FOSDEM 2023, I watched a Lightning Talk by Frank Vanbever titled “Lua for the Lazy C developer”. I had recently suggested at work that we should be using Lua to script the behavior of some systems which are written in Go, so the talk strongly resonated with me.

Lua is an ideal scripting language for embedding into other programs because it is small and provides excellent bindings in both directions – Lua code can call native code, and vice versa. Because Go has good hash tables as part of the language, using Lua as a container for your hash tables is probably less interesting than from C though.

pkgsrc and a Call for Action

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 09:54:31 +0000

I have been a pkgsrc developer for several years. For what it’s worth, I think pkgsrc is wonderful: a large selection of third-party software, packaged so that it is easy to install with a single command – either building everything from source, or relying on binary packages. pkgsrc supports dozens of OSes – not just NetBSD but also other BSDs, macOS, Linux, Illumos and more.

On the other hand, unfortunately, pkgsrc and NetBSD in general are suffering from what I would call a loss of mindshare. When I joined the NetBSD Foundation as a developer, I had the impression that NetBSD had more users and community than OpenBSD or, say, Dragonfly. In recent years however, it seems to me that people have more or less forgotten about NetBSD and pkgsrc.

Over to Mastodon, I guess

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 11:11:37 +0100

It took me quite a while to realize that I have been here before.

When Google+ (the greatest social network I have used, by the way) was killed, somebody spun up Pluspora as a refuge. It was a Pod of something called diaspora. It was nice in the beginning, then gradually I interacted with it less – since, TBH, there wasn’t much content, and I also didn’t post much. Eventually, the person running the Pod died, and their family ended up switching it off.

Using a Mi Band with Strava

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 18:23:20 +0000

I have used a Mi Band as a smartwatch / fitness tracking device for the last couple years. Compared to, say, a Wear OS device, it offers a vastly better deal:

It’s cheap, at around 30-40 CHF.
The battery lasts several weeks.
It shows the time and tracks steps and movement.

The Wear OS device costs 5-10 times as much and needs daily charging. To be fair, in addition to showing the time and tracking fitness data, it does many other things that I don’t need.

Agile Development: Micromanage yourself

Sun, 10 Apr 2022 17:13:05 +0200

Recently, I was thinking about one of my previous software development teams at work. Our program manager was a former Scrum master, so he taught us the basics of the Scrum method, which is one of the Agile development methodologies.

Now, the funny thing was that Scrum includes a number of rituals and techniques, and the book essentially states that you must do all of them or it won’t work; despite that, we used a subset and were somewhat successful with it. We also practiced continuous delivery by accident: because we didn’t use experiments or another way to gate new features, they became available to users as soon as they got merged, with the next daily release.

The BulkTracker Outage

Sat, 08 Jan 2022 17:12:44 +0100

I have been running the BulkTracker web app for keeping track of pkgsrc bulk package build results since about 2015.

After running without problems since the start (!!), the BulkTracker app had its first outage in November of 2021. It turns out that the function that renders the home page returns a 500 if it gets an error from Datastore. The error that was returned was:

rpc error: code = ResourceExhausted desc = Quota exceeded.

After complaining on Twitter, I fixed the handler to return at least a degraded home page in case of Datastore errors. But why was there an error in the first place? According to the “Quotas” page on the Google Cloud Console, there are no Datastore-related quotas that can be exhausted – essentially, you can use as much as you need as long as you pay for it. I fixed the handler to return at least a degraded home page in case of Datastore errors.

go-modules.mk

Sun, 07 Nov 2021 11:27:00 +0100

The BSD build system in general, and pkgsrc in particular, have a large number of Makefiles ending in .mk.

Recently, I was looking at a commit message in Gmail and noticed that these names are linkified. At the time, I was looking at a Go module package, where there is a go-modules.mk file containing details about dependencies. This got me thinking: Why is this file name turned into a link?

It turns out that .mk is the ccTLD of the Republic of North Macedonia! So I did what I had to do: I went to the website of a registrar in Skopje and reserved the go-modules.mk domain.

More Go modules in pkgsrc

Wed, 12 May 2021 18:31:25 +0000

This weekend, I made a series of somewhat unusual changes to pkgsrc.

I removed a bunch of Go packages.

Why? Because of Go modules.

What are Go modules?

Since my series of design-ish blog posts(part 1, part 2), Go module builds have fully landed in pkgsrc, to the point that they are now the preferred way to build Go packages.

To recap: There are two ways to use the go tool to build Go code.

NetBSD VM on bhyve (on TrueNAS)

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 16:50:20 +0000

My new NAS at home is running TrueNAS Core. So far, it has been excellent, however I struggled a bit setting up a NetBSD VM on it. Part of the problem is that a lot of the docs and how-tos I found are stale, and the information in it no longer applies.

TrueNAS Core allows running VMs using bhyve, which is FreeBSD’s hypervisor. NetBSD is not an officially supported OS, at least according to the guest OS chooser in the TrueNAS web UI :) But since the release of NetBSD 9 a while ago, things have become far simpler than they used to be – with one caveat (see below).

The Refinery, an Analogy for Distributed Systems

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 14:06:35 +0000

Back when I was in Engineering school, my first-year internship happened in a refinery. In retrospect, this turned out to be extremely relevant for my current job in tech.

The subject of my internship was the optimization of an existing process. The unit had been planned on paper by an engineer on another continent, installed according to specs, and it turned out to be … not working so well.

Don’t believe Tech is unique

A refinery is a distributed system. There are specs and basically internal contracts on each sub-unit regarding the quantity it should process per day, what the requirements for inputs and the desired output characteristics are. Instead of queries, the inputs and outputs are, you know, oil and gas.

SSD Rochade

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 20:25:48 +0100

My desktop PC has two NVMe drives, one for Windows and one for NetBSD. With Steam game footprints being what they are, the Windows one (256 GB) has been perpetually overfull, so it was time for something bigger.

At the same time, I had bought an NVMe daughter board for my Pinebook Pro. My impression with the PBP is that the I/O performance of the eMMC module is holding it back, so I am excited to give it fast storage :)

Reflections on Ops

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 06:50:32 +0000

I never spent much time toiling in the “sysadmin job” mines, though my first job was user support and admin. Later, I joined Google SRE and worked with both world-class and mediocre tools. As a junior SRE, you are mostly a user of these tools, though it is easy to pat yourself on the back and think of yourself as better than the run-of-the-mill admin because all this automation is available to you.

pkgsrc Developer Monotony

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 18:19:24 +0000

Somehow, my contributions to NetBSD and pkgsrc have become monotonous. Because I am busy with work, family and real life, the amount of time I can spend on open source is fairly limited, and I have two commitments that I try to fulfill:

Member of pkgsrc-releng: I process most of the pull-ups to the stable quarterly branch.
Maintainer of Go and its infrastructure.

Unfortunately, these things are always kinda the same.

Using CPU Subsets for Building Software

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 14:53:01 +0000

Like many ARM CPUs, the one in the Pinebook Pro has a “big.LITTLE” architecture, where some cores are more powerful than others:

[     1.000000] cpu0 at cpus0: Arm Cortex-A53 r0p4 (v8-A), id 0x0
[     1.000000] cpu1 at cpus0: Arm Cortex-A53 r0p4 (v8-A), id 0x1
[     1.000000] cpu2 at cpus0: Arm Cortex-A53 r0p4 (v8-A), id 0x2
[     1.000000] cpu3 at cpus0: Arm Cortex-A53 r0p4 (v8-A), id 0x3
[     1.000000] cpu4 at cpus0: Arm Cortex-A72 r0p2 (v8-A), id 0x100
[     1.000000] cpu5 at cpus0: Arm Cortex-A72 r0p2 (v8-A), id 0x101

The A72 is a more powerful than the efficiency-oriented A53, it has out-of-order execution, plus it reaches a higher maximum clock rate (1.4 GHz for the A53 and 2.0 GHz for the A72 in the Pinebook Pro).

Getting Started with NetBSD on the Pinebook Pro

Sat, 20 Jun 2020 18:09:23 +0200

If you buy a Pinebook Pro now, it comes with Manjaro Linux on the internal eMMC storage. Let’s install NetBSD instead!

The easiest way to get started is to buy a decent micro-SD card (what sort of markings it should have is a science of its own, by the way) and install NetBSD on that. On a warm boot (i.e. when rebooting a running system), the micro-SD card has priority compared to the eMMC, so the system will boot from there.

Pinebook Pro, First Impressions

Sun, 31 May 2020 16:04:25 +0000

Note: This post was written on the Pinebook Pro :)

After seeing it in action at FOSDEM (from afar, as the crowd was too large), I decided to buy a Pinebook Pro for personal use. From the beginning, the intention was to use it for pkgsrc development, with NetBSD as the main OS. It was finally delivered on Thursday, one day earlier than promised, so I thought I would write down my first impressions.

How to do Pull-ups to pkgsrc-stable

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 11:30:58 +0100

I am part of the pkgsrc releng (release engineering) team. My main task there is handling pull-ups into the stable branch.

pkgsrc creates a stable branch every three months and names it after the respective quarter – for example, the last branch was called 2019Q4. Pull-ups are tickets to “pull up” one or more commit from the development branch into the stable branch. Typical justifications for pull-ups are:

security updates
build fixes
important bug fixes (such as when the package crashes on startup)

In addition, sometimes we pull up updates to packages if they are “leaves” and stop working without regular updates. Some web scrapers, for example, need regular updates to keep up with changes in the sites they scrape.

A Tale of Two Spellcheckers

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 20:44:00 +0200

This is a transcript of the talk I gave at pkgsrcCon 2019 in Cambridge, UK. It is about spellcheckers, but there are much more general software engineering lessons that we can learn from this case study.

The reason I got into this subject at all was my paternal leave last year, when I finally had some more time to spend working on pkgsrc. It was a tiny item in the enormous TODO file at the top of the source tree (“update enchant to version 2.2”) that made me go into this rabbit hole.

pkgsrccon 2019: Talk Announcement

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 19:29:04 +0200

In a few weeks, on the weekend of July 13 and 14, the annual pkgsrc conference, pkgsrcCon 2019, will take place in Cambridge, UK. Whether you are a user or developer of pkgsrc, this is a really nice place to meet the developers and spend some time hacking together and listening to talks.

My talk this year was originally supposed to be about Go module support in pkgsrc, but that work did not get done in time. So instead, I will talk about something entirely different:

Supporting Go Modules in pkgsrc (Part 2)

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 20:19:43 +0200

This announcement dropped today:

The #golang Module Mirror (~caching proxy), Index, and Checksum DB have launched:https://t.co/IrUZXimjCk https://t.co/sO1wvgsKxx https://t.co/8XrlUF3cX5

Announcement:https://t.co/kjWK58OKsb

Props to team. (I did nothing.)

🚀🎉
— Brad Fitzpatrick (@bradfitz) April 29, 2019

I realized that this is the missing piece for supporting Go modules in pkgsrc. If you go back and reread the “fetch” section in Supporting Go Modules in pkgsrc, it seems a bit awkward compared to a standard fetch action. The reason is that go mod download re-packs the source into its own zip format archive.

Pkgsrc Buildbots

Mon, 04 Feb 2019 17:15:42 +0100

After talking to Sijmen Mulder on IRC (thanks, TGV Wi-Fi!), I began thinking more about how you could automate the pkgsrc release engineers away.

The basic idea for a buildbot would be this:

Download and unpack latest pkgsrc.tar.gz for the stable branch.
Run the pullup script with the ticket number, then run whatever pullup script it outputs.
Figure out the package that this concerns (perhaps from filenames).
Go to the package in question, install its dependencies from binary packages.
Build (make package is probably enough, or perhaps also install?).
Upload build log to Cloud Storage.
Post an email to the pullup thread with status and a link to the log.

For extra points, do this in a fresh, ephemeral VM, triggered by an incoming mail.

Supporting Go Modules in pkgsrc, a Proposal

Sat, 29 Dec 2018 13:12:02 +0100

Go 1.11 introduced a new way of building Go code that no longer needs a GOPATH at all. In due course, this will become the default way of building. What’s more, sooner or later, we are going to want to package software that only builds with modules.

There should be some package-settable variable that controls whether you want to use modules or not. If you are going to use modules, then the repo should have a go.mod file. Otherwise (e.g. if there is a dep file or something), the build could start by doing go mod init (which needs to be after make extract).

Race Condition at the Pool

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 20:10:09 +0100

Recently, I stumbled upon an odd race condition, at the local public pool of all places. The following workflow, which should be standard, does not work:

Buy a 10-entry ticket and pay with debit card.
Immediately try to redeem one entry to, well, go for a swim.

The freshly printed card will be declined, and you have to ask for help. When you leave (because this is Switzerland and everyone is honest, right!?), you hand in the card at the cash desk, and it is perfectly fine.

pkgsrc: Upgrading, Part 1

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 18:46:40 +0100

I found this text in my post drafts, where it had been sitting for a bit. Consider this the first part of a series on keeping pkgsrc up to date.

If you have not upgraded the packages in your pkgsrc installation in a while, you might be so far behind on updates that most or all your packages are outdated. Now what?

The easiest way to update you packages in order is to simply use pkg_rolling-replace. Update your pkgsrc tree (either to the latest from cvs, or to a supported quarterly release), then simply run

Build Systems: CMake and Autotools

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 17:53:22 +0100

I think I am finally warming up to CMake.

Eight years ago (at FOSDEM 2010), I gave a talk on build systems that explains the fundamentals of automake, autoconf and libtool:

Build Systems with autoconf, automake and libtool [updated] by Benny Siegert

There is nothing in this talk that is no longer valid today as far as I can see, though CMake was “newfangled” then and is a lot less so today. In any case, my conclusion still stands:

Working categories

Sun, 05 Aug 2018 14:43:49 +0300

Vacation is a good time for some housekeeping. So I managed to get categories for posts working! In the process, I learned a bit about how hugo works.

Hugo automatically creates so-called taxonomies for tags and categories. The theme I have been using only shows categories in the header itself. And I managed to disable the categories taxonomy in the config file. And I got the syntax for specifying them wrong.

Windows 10 April Update, unbootable system

Wed, 09 May 2018 18:44:00 +0200

A few days ago, I installed the Windows 10 “April update”, and it broke my GRUB installation. What happened?

My primary disk has an MBR partition table. (Apparently, booting from GPT requires using UEFI, which exposes a whole new exciting set of firmware bugs.) GRUB was installed in a small ext2 partition (primary partition #3), while primary partitions #1 and #2 were used by Windows 10. Installing the April update created another primary partition and moved my ext2 partition to slot #4 so grub can no longer find its files.

New Blog!

Thu, 18 Jan 2018 19:44:52 +0100

My new year’s resolution for 2018 has been to blog more. So I decided to create an actual blog!

It started with me closing my Amazon AWS account and writing about it. The posting was up as a Gist on Github, and I shared that URL. This does give a useful viewer and the ability to add comments, but it is hardly discoverable. Anyway, the post was somewhat widely circulated (the provocative title certainly helped) and even made it to Reddit.

Leaving AWS

Sun, 03 Dec 2017 22:16:42 +0100

Today, I deleted my Amazon AWS account.

And done!

I had been on AWS since about 2011. My usage was mainly for two things:

Saving large amounts of files (build logs and such) on S3;
Running NetBSD VMs on EC2.

EC2 is based on Xen, and NetBSD runs really well in PV (paravirtualized) mode on Xen. However, XSA-240 means that a malicious PV guest may crash (or even otherwise exploit) the hypervisor, with the recommended fix being to not run untrusted PV guests. Over night, Amazon disabled PV, making NetBSD VMs useless.

Packaging Go code in pkgsrc

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 20:25:36 +0200

New Features in BulkTracker

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 15:00:00 +0100

blog @ TNF

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:53:03 +0100

So now I am even posting over at TNF on http://blog.NetBSD.org/. Julian Fagir made new NetBSD flyers, and I committed them to the TNF website.

I know that I should write more here but there is not much new on the MirBSD front.

I updated the showcase to NetBSD-6_BETA on the Dom0, and now X refuses to start. Oh well. X does start when using a GENERIC kernel. This is very bad for showcase use, of course :(. pkgsrc is going into freeze very soon, and I did not do a whole lot of MirBSD fixes this time around. This is due to illness, searching for a new job, and working on the Go programming language, which is expected to hit version 1.0 Real Soon Now(TM).