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jonhermansen

Show HN: Darnix – Darwin Built with Nix

https://github.com/jonhermansen/darnix

The Darwin kernel (XNU) has been open source since 1999. But "open source" and "you can actually build and boot it" are very different things. XNU depends on proprietary tooling, kexts, and a bunch of open source projects published without a build system.Darnix builds the whole thing with Nix. The kernel, the filesystem, the boot image, all the way to a running QEMU instance. We patched XNU to...

( Read More... | 1 comment | 9 points | on HN )
John,

Thank you for supporting and encouraging me to push the envelope further.

NixBSD was already in great shape, I just wanted to add a little bit of polish and make it easier for people to consume. I hope that the demo may help get others interested and to get set up locally.

I would like to add support for additional kernels. I heard that NetBSD can also boot from ZFS, but I haven't worked out all the details yet. I might like to experiment with that some time.

I've also been keeping an eye on Cygwin support, and it would also be quite interesting to NixOS-ify ReactOS :p

Show HN: I made a dual-bootable NixBSD (NixOS and FreeBSD) image

https://github.com/jonhermansen/nixbsd-demo

I've been working on getting NixBSD (Nix package manager + FreeBSD) to boot alongside NixOS on a shared ZFS pool. The result is a <2GB disk image you can try in QEMU or virt-manager.What works: - GRUB chainloads FreeBSD's bootloader - Both systems share a ZFS pool - Everything is defined in a single Nix flake - Fully reproducible builds (some dependencies are now cached on...

( Read More... | 2 comments | 3 points | on HN )
Re:OS maintained by a single developer since 1997: Visopsys on Sunday November 02, 2025 @12:10AM (#45787796)
Michael MJD did a video on this recently :)

https://youtu.be/5MZljgXW2WA

Re:I can't pay rent because devs just don't care on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @04:13PM (#43837507)
While I agree with you that a lot of sub-par technical people are relegated to the role of QA, just because you haven't seen one proper QA person in your life, doesn't mean they don't exist.

Have you ever thought to ask if the company you're working for puts their money where their mouth is, when it comes to quality? If they did, how are these people getting hired in the first place? What responsibility falls on the engineers who interviewed these folks? Does your reporting structure reward people who raise problems, or punish them? Who do your QA people report to? And please don't say the head of development, who is responsible for deliverable dates.

The best QA people I've ever known had such a good grasp on the market and customer needs that they were, in fact, product managers. Sounds like you've probably had a similar experience.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's plenty to learn from Statistical Process Control and Deming, etc.

I've worked on more projects without a requirements specification, than with one. Without a competent PM, how will QA people even test? I guess they can intuit what the product actually needs to do, but then there's ambiguity. The reality is that someone (product) needs to document exactly what the product needs to do and how it must operate, in no uncertain terms. Even with a spec, it's often still quite ambiguous. I honestly see these problems as organizational, so when you slag on the QA folks, I get a little miffed.

I've caught plenty of bugs at review time, that could have been caught by some basic cursory testing on the developer's part. Mistakes happen. Even QA people make mistakes, we're all human after all. Does placing the blame directly on the QA people really help you? Imagine if you started asking questions about your development process, and where things could have gone wrong? The fish rots from the head, and often times bad practices are (explicitly or implicitly) rewarded by management, because they result in faster iterations, shorter delivery time, but something is definitely being lost here.

Sorry if my rant is slightly inflammatory, this is coming from a QA person who has seen a lot of these failures in practice, so I feel the need to defend the position a bit.

Re:Steam Deck OLED on Friday November 10, 2023 @03:19AM (#38216431)
Here is a community-maintained list of banking apps that can work without SafetyNet: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...

Last time I was looking for a new bank, I picked one from this list based on the reports available. Thankfully my bank app is not so locked down.

Hope you can find something that works for you.

Re:FreeBSD Bhyve Virtualization on Friday August 18, 2023 @12:47AM (#37171490)
Hey vermaden, great article! I saw you had some problems with virt-manager, and I did too! There is a solution your problem:

> I was able to start FreeBSD 13.2 installation … but it got frozen at the kernel messages and nothing more happened.

If you notice at the bootloader screen, it says something like "5. Cons: Dual (Serial primary)"

Pressing the 5 key at the bootloader screen will toggle the output from "Serial primary" to "Video primary" or something to that effect. Once you toggle this setting, it should fix the output hanging and you should get a login prompt.

The other way to fix this problem, is through the virt-manager menu, you can simply switch the view from Graphical Console, to the Serial Console. Under View -> Consoles -> Serial 1

Hope this helps make your experience a little better under virt-manager.

The justice system has many flaws including incompetence and corruption, they don't always get it right.

Assuming the parent poster's guilt is fair, but god help you if the system ever gets turned against you.

"show me the man and I'll show you the crime"

> current trend of people just doing extreme stuff to try to get views. A few people have been killed

This is just natural selection at work.

Re:Google Pixel Fold on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @11:34PM (#35897050)
I believe you can install LineageOS on any old Pixel and still get updates. Though the type of updates will be limited. https://www.lineageos.org/
Of course you are correct that supporting Twitter or any service is a moving target, so long as it changes. But that doesn't mean specific bugs can't be captured in a test case.

Watch this video of Andreas doing exactly this, albeit for a simpler web app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4SxKWwFhA0

At one point, he deletes half the HTML file to isolate where in the site the problematic code is. In a way doing a kind of binary search. After a few iterations of this, he comes up with a very small case that exhibits the problem he's trying to solve.

It's clear he knows his way around the codebase and where to make changes, but isolating these test cases is probably as important. And presumably if you fixed enough of these issues, 99% of the modern web should work just fine.

Re:Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?) on Monday November 01, 2021 @07:57PM (#29075032)
Thank you Paul for your excellent work on Ardour!
Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk on Thursday March 25, 2021 @04:38PM (#26585086)
If you are using LVM on all of your filesystems, it seems like a bad idea to use a file residing on LVM block device as another PV. And actually I'd be surprised if this was even allowed. Though maybe it is difficult to detect.

You'd effectively send all block changes through LVM twice (once through the file, then through the underlying block device(s))

Re:Why isn't Godot an ECS-based game engine? on Saturday February 27, 2021 @01:19PM (#26286841)
For anyone curious to know more about usage of ECS in Overwatch, check out this GDC talk from one of the developers: https://youtu.be/W3aieHjyNvw
Re:Disclosure: Another macOS privacy protections bypass on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @07:12PM (#23695896)
Wouldn't that kinda defeat the whole purpose of signing the app?
Re:I have no side code projects to show you on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @10:24PM (#15555883)
Hopefully they weren’t trying to hire you for a QA position...