From 0 to 1 MB in DOS

If you have been following the development of EndBASIC, you know its console can display both text and graphics at once. What you may not know is that, now, it can also achieve this feat on the NetBSD console without using X11 at all. This is done by directly rendering to the wsdisplay framebuffer, and this article presents a crash course on...

Make, as arcane as a build tool can be, may still be a good first fit for certain scenarios. “Heresy!”, you say, as you hear a so-called “Bazel expert” utter these words. The specific problem I’m facing is that I need to glue together the NetBSD build system, a quilt patch set, EndBASIC’s Cargo-based Rust build, and a couple of QEMU invocations...

I recently picked up an embedded project in which I needed to build a highly customized full system image with minimal boot times. As I explored my options, I came to the conclusion that NetBSD, the often-forgotten BSD variant, was the best viable choice for my project. One reason for this choice is NetBSD’s build system. Once you look and get...

My interest in storage is longstanding—I loved playing with different file systems in my early Unix days and then I worked on Google’s and Microsoft’s distributed storage solutions—and, about four years ago, I started running a home-grown NAS leveraging FreeBSD and its excellent ZFS support. I first hosted the server on a PowerMac G5 and then...

I recently got a Synology DS923+ for evaluation purposes which led me to setting up NFSv4 with Kerberos. I had done this about a year ago with FreeBSD as the host, and going through this process once again reminded me of how painful it is to secure an NFS connection. You see, Samba is much easier to set up, but because NFS is the native file...