RSS Parrot

BETA

🦜 benzblog

@bentsukun.ch@rss-parrot.net

I'm an automated parrot! I relay a website's RSS feed to the Fediverse. Every time a new post appears in the feed, I toot about it. Follow me to get all new posts in your Mastodon timeline! Brought to you by the RSS Parrot.

---

Recent content on benzblog

Your feed and you don't want it here? Just e-mail the birb.

Site URL: bentsukun.ch/

Feed URL: bentsukun.ch/index.xml

Posts: 57

Followers: 1

MCP bad?

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/mcp/

Published: May 25, 2026 09:05

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…

It's not Track 9 3/4

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/track_9_3_4/

Published: March 17, 2026 16:38

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…

Rust in the Kernel, and other odd decisions

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/netbsd-rust-kernel/

Published: January 30, 2026 11:19

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…

San Francisco, 2025

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/san-francisco-2025/

Published: November 15, 2025 16:01

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!…

Booting NetBSD from a wedge, the hard way

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/netbsd-wedge-boot/

Published: August 29, 2025 07:49

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…

Some nuanced thoughts on AI

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/ai-nuance/

Published: May 4, 2025 14:51

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…

Developing pkgsrc with git

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/pkgsrc-with-git/

Published: March 9, 2025 16:13

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…

"Founder Mode"

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/founder-mode/

Published: January 19, 2025 20:46

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…

Emulating *BSD on ARM, Part 3: OpenBSD

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/openbsd-arm-qemu/

Published: December 23, 2024 10:41

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…

Emulating *BSD on ARM, Part 2: FreeBSD

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/freebsd-arm-qemu/

Published: November 11, 2024 19:52

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…

Emulating *BSD on ARM, Part 1: Introduction

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/bsd-arm-qemu/

Published: October 28, 2024 18:30

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.…

The code is not enough

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/reading-code/

Published: August 27, 2024 09:46

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…

Fedora Update: btrfs self-destruct

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/fedora-btrfs/

Published: May 7, 2024 20:21

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…

The XZ Backdoor

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/xz-backdoor/

Published: March 31, 2024 18:32

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…

Fedora Asahi Remix

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/fedora-asahi/

Published: February 3, 2024 09:21

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…

NetBSD 10: Thirty Years, Still Going Strong!

https://bentsukun.ch/talks/fosdem2024/

Published: February 1, 2024 09:00

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…

The VS Code Flatpak is useless

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/vscode-flatpak/

Published: January 14, 2024 17:47

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…

Building a NetBSD ramdisk kernel

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/ramdisk-kernel/

Published: November 26, 2023 14:08

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…

Talk about the Basics

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/talk-about-basics/

Published: October 14, 2023 19:23

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.…

pkgsrc statt Containern!

https://bentsukun.ch/talks/linuxday2023/

Published: September 30, 2023 15:37

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…

Culture is about the small things

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/culture-small-things/

Published: September 14, 2023 10:43

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…

Operating Systems, Transit and Cultural Influences

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/os-culture/

Published: June 17, 2023 09:50

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…

On Meetings

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/meetings/

Published: April 23, 2023 19:17

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…

Using Lua from Go

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/go-lua/

Published: February 6, 2023 13:51

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…

pkgsrc and a Call for Action

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/pkgsrc-agitprop/

Published: February 3, 2023 09:54

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…

Over to Mastodon, I guess

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/fediverse/

Published: November 19, 2022 10:11

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,…

Using a Mi Band with Strava

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/mi-band-strava/

Published: October 13, 2022 18:23

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…

Agile Development: Micromanage yourself

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/agile/

Published: April 10, 2022 15:13

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…

The BulkTracker Outage

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/bulktracker-outage/

Published: January 8, 2022 16:12

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…

go-modules.mk

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/go-modules-mk/

Published: November 7, 2021 10:27

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,…

More Go modules in pkgsrc

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/go-mod-support-3/

Published: May 12, 2021 18:31

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,…

NetBSD VM on bhyve (on TrueNAS)

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/bhyve-netbsd/

Published: April 25, 2021 16:50

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.…

The Refinery, an Analogy for Distributed Systems

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/refinery/

Published: March 4, 2021 14:06

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…

SSD Rochade

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/ssd-rochade/

Published: January 4, 2021 19:25

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…

Reflections on Ops

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/ops/

Published: October 23, 2020 06:50

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…

pkgsrc Developer Monotony

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/pkgsrc-toil/

Published: September 8, 2020 18:19

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…

Using CPU Subsets for Building Software

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/psrset/

Published: July 4, 2020 14:53

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…

Getting Started with NetBSD on the Pinebook Pro

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/pinebook-pro-netbsd/

Published: June 20, 2020 16:09

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…

Pinebook Pro, First Impressions

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/pinebook-pro/

Published: May 31, 2020 16:04

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…

How to do Pull-ups to pkgsrc-stable

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/pullups/

Published: February 3, 2020 10:30

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…

A Tale of Two Spellcheckers

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/pkgsrccon-2019/

Published: July 15, 2019 18:44

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…

pkgsrccon 2019: Talk Announcement

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/pkgsrccon-2019-ann/

Published: July 2, 2019 17:29

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…

Supporting Go Modules in pkgsrc (Part 2)

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/go-mod-support-2/

Published: April 30, 2019 18:19

This announcement dropped today: The #golang Module Mirror (~caching proxy), Index, and Checksum DB have launched:https://t.co/IrUZXimjCkhttps://t.co/sO1wvgsKxxhttps://t.co/8XrlUF3cX5Announcement:https://t.co/kjWK58OKsbProps to team. (I did nothing.)🚀🎉—…

Pkgsrc Buildbots

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/pkgsrc-buildbots/

Published: February 4, 2019 16:15

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.…

Supporting Go Modules in pkgsrc, a Proposal

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/go-mod-support/

Published: December 29, 2018 12:12

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…

Race Condition at the Pool

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/race-condition-at-the-pool/

Published: November 20, 2018 19:10

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…

pkgsrc: Upgrading, Part 1

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/pkgsrc-upgrade1/

Published: November 10, 2018 17:46

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…

Build Systems: CMake and Autotools

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/build-systems/

Published: November 10, 2018 16:53

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 …

Working categories

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/categories/

Published: August 5, 2018 11:43

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…

Windows 10 April Update, unbootable system

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/april-update/

Published: May 9, 2018 16:44

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…

New Blog!

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/new-blog/

Published: January 18, 2018 18:44

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…

Leaving AWS

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/leaving-aws/

Published: December 3, 2017 21:16

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…

blog @ TNF

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/blog-tnf/

Published: March 20, 2012 19:53

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…