Hacker News: mrpippy

New comment by mrpippy in "RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source"

mrpippy — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:50:40 +0000

Yes, real apps use Mach messaging directly. i.e.: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ipc...

New comment by mrpippy in "RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source"

mrpippy — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 19:23:55 +0000

The Mach APIs are available to userland applications, if you used a different kernel you’d have to implement them somehow

New comment by mrpippy in "NetBSD GSoC 2026 Improving RAIDframe"

mrpippy — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:59:29 +0000

Especially since the Linux kernel dropping support usually happens years after distributions already have, so it would be quite difficult to run actual software on such hardware anyway. Whereas NetBSD is an entire OS.

New comment by mrpippy in "Xorg-server 26.1.0 rc1"

mrpippy — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:22:24 +0000

Alan Coopersmith works at Oracle, on Solaris. I don't know of any effort to use Wayland on Solaris, so maintaining X really is their only option.

OTOH, RedHat seems happy to let X die.

New comment by mrpippy in "Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage"

mrpippy — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:09:41 +0000

There were Itanium workstations (https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_i2000.html, https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_zx2000.html), but of course these quickly crashed and burned with the rest of Itanium

New comment by mrpippy in "Teardown: The BMW / Harman IDC23H Infotainment Unit (B423)"

mrpippy — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:42:38 +0000

Not to mention rendering the driver’s display (gauge cluster)

New comment by mrpippy in "Teardown: The BMW / Harman IDC23H Infotainment Unit (B423)"

mrpippy — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:41:52 +0000

It’s rendering the driver’s display (i.e. the gauge cluster), the driver HUD, the central display, watching a driver-facing camera for fatigue alerting, handling Bluetooth, WiFi, navigation. Calling it an “infotainment” system is underselling a bit

New comment by mrpippy in "JEP 541: Deprecate the macOS/x64 Port for Removal"

mrpippy — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:31:08 +0000

That’s correct, Rosetta for running x86_64 binaries in Linux VMs is not going away. They’re no longer branding this feature as Rosetta, so it doesn’t get lumped in with the Rosetta removal for Mac binaries (although it’s all still kinda confusing)

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Virtualization/run...

New comment by mrpippy in "CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026"

mrpippy — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:07:47 +0000

For some reason, the PS4 and PS5 actually cannot play audio CDs

New comment by mrpippy in "Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail"

mrpippy — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 05:10:12 +0000

These links show the pinout:

https://hardware.majix.org/computers/sgi/keyboards.shtml https://hardware.majix.org/computers/sgi.pi/keyboard.shtml

And the keyboard(7) man page actually has full details on the protocol (Indigo uses the mini DIN-6): https://github.com/jtsiomb/sgikbd/blob/master/doc/sgi_man7_k...

New comment by mrpippy in "Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail"

mrpippy — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 03:53:29 +0000

Also, SGI keyboards never used ADB. Indigo-era SGIs used a mini-DIN keyboard/mouse, but it was proprietary. They were PS/2 starting with the Indigo2 and Indy.

New comment by mrpippy in "You can power on a Mac remotely"

mrpippy — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:49:16 +0000

My memory from classic Mac OS is that pushing the keyboard soft-power key brought up a system-modal dialog asking if you wanted to shut down, restart, or cancel, a dialog with exactly the same design as: <http://www.christianboyce.com/page25/files/tipofthedayjulyth...>

That would obviously not be compatible with a server, maybe if soft power was just constantly held down starting from boot that dialog wouldn't show up?

New comment by mrpippy in "Swift at Apple: Migrating the TrueType hinting interpreter"

mrpippy — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:06:42 +0000

The author discussed this a bit on Mastodon as well:

https://xoxo.zone/@numist/116716469017975106

New comment by mrpippy in "Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0"

mrpippy — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:10:56 +0000

At this point that would be a 2018 Mac mini, which can only run Sequoia (which will be out-of-support at the same time as Homebrew drops Intel support).

If you want Intel support, MacPorts still runs back to Leopard.

New comment by mrpippy in "macOS Container Machines"

mrpippy — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:39:49 +0000

Virtualization.framework just gained USB passthrough support in macOS 27. It might be a niche feature for containers to add, but other VM software will likely add support soon.

New comment by mrpippy in "I Found a Bug in Apple's Fsck_hfs"

mrpippy — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:57:40 +0000

I would consider HFS+ to be a legacy filesystem at this point, something you shouldn't use without a really good reason (interop with pre-macOS 10.13 machines being the only one I can think of).

Fun fact: HFS dates back to the 80s, and so does the fsck code. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/hfs/blob/main/lib... still contains '#if BSD' blocks for the Mac OS X code, and classic Mac code in the '#else'.

And 'dfalib' refers to 'Disk First Aid', the classic Mac fsck application.

New comment by mrpippy in "I Found a Bug in Apple's Fsck_hfs"

mrpippy — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:49:06 +0000

Note to the author: did you file an Apple feedback for this? You should put that FB number in your post and the GitHub repo, it will ease the process for any Apple employees who see this and want to get it fixed.

New comment by mrpippy in "macOS needs its grid back"

mrpippy — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:45:45 +0000

Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger

New comment by mrpippy in "Windows GOG DOS Games on M-Series Macs"

mrpippy — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:33:31 +0000

Those are still needed for the Rosetta use-cases that are sticking around (old games, Linux binaries)

New comment by mrpippy in "SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)"

mrpippy — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:36:40 +0000

I feel like that's true for early/mid-90s games where the PC version targeted DOS (+ the varied universe of PC video/sound hardware), and the Mac version could just target the much more uniform Mac platform.

But SimCity 3000 is from 1999, and the PC version was a normal Win9x game. I own (still have the CD) the SimCity 3000 Mac port, and it is not very good. Maxis didn't port it themselves, it was done by Software MacKiev. System requirements were quite high for the time, it was sluggish, often unstable, and the file open/save dialogs reused the Windows-style dialogs which was very awkward.

The soundtrack is great though.