S4E429 — Wine Ported to OpenBSD

GARY: —so I told the board, if the port ships, we're looking at a full platform event. Wine, packaged for OpenBSD. Somebody finally bundled it.

MAEVE: Maeve. General partner, two billion dollars. Gary, nobody bundled anything. Someone ported a compatibility layer to the most hostile operating system on earth, and it is the most surprising port proposal of the year.

GARY: Gary. Sorry, I go first? I forget the order of my own show.

OBI: Obi. Staff SRE. And it's not "packaged," Gary. Someone wrote a new port. Real work. The kind that doesn't get a launch post — it gets an email to a mailing list at ten p.m.

GARY: That's basically the same thing—

OBI: It is the opposite of the same thing.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field researcher. Artifact logged: unexpected compatibility event. Humans surprised when machine runs wrong machine. Noted.

MAEVE: The stakes, briefly: OpenBSD can't even set gsbase. And someone emulated it anyway.

GARY: Right, so the gates swing open, everyone gets Wine, this is basically a Series A for the entire desktop—

GRUNER: Gary. You hear words. Meaning no.

MAEVE: Read the actual claim, Gary. Slowly. Like it's a term sheet.

GARY: Okay. "The gates swung open with Andrii's software solution to the %gs issue."

OBI: That's a mailing list, Gary. Not a ribbon-cutting.

GARY: Same energy. You can't set gsbase, so they emulate the %gs prefix in software. It's a hack, and it's a beautiful hack—

OBI: It's not a hack. It's engineering. Kernel won't give them a register, so they built the register. That's the whole port.

MAEVE: And it works. Several dozen 64-bit Windows programs, tested mostly successfully. Mostly. Successful-ish. I'd call that a market.

GRUNER: "Mostly" is load-bearing word.

GARY: The Witcher 3 Remaster runs. Released last month. Runs well, with vkd3d-proton added.

OBI: With vkd3d-proton added. Read the README, Gary. The README is carrying this port like a stretcher.

MAEVE: You're all missing the scale. This is standard railway gauge. One layer, adopted everywhere, every Windows program on every Unix—

GARY: Oh, here we go—

MAEVE: —exactly like gauge standardization in the eighteen-forties. Railways died until the gauges matched. Wine is the gauge. OpenBSD is the track. Every Windows app is a freight car—

OBI: A freight car with two wheels missing.

MAEVE: Extending the metaphor, Obi—

OBI: You can't extend it. The article kills it. Biggest limitation: WoW64 doesn't work. Thirty-two-bit Windows software is a no-op.

MAEVE: Half the freight fleet doesn't fit the gauge.

GARY: Half the fleet is vintage! That's collector's inventory!

OBI: It's a no-op, Gary. It does nothing. It is the nothing.

GRUNER: Field note. Question: humans port applications, or port consequences? Evidence pending.

MAEVE: The gauge still holds for the sixty-four-bit cars—

OBI: Bullshit. Your gauge moves half the cargo and calls it a railway.

GARY: It's a railway with a waitlist—

MAEVE: Do not put my theory on your waitlist, Gary.

OBI: The theory is a no-op, Maeve. Welcome to the club.

GRUNER: Theory dead. Gauge too narrow. Suka.

GARY: The theory is resting!

OBI: It's resting the way WoW64 rests. Completely.

MAEVE: ndbe. "Insane work!"

OBI: Two words, and still the most accurate technical review of this port.

GARY: The Witcher remaster runs! If I had money I would simply gift to those guys.

MAEVE: You're quoting a commenter, Gary.

GARY: I'm agreeing with a commenter. Big difference. I've never had money, so the gifting stays theoretical—

OBI: Read the rest of the README, Gary. Built-in tests disabled. They need the X server, and multiple tests still hang.

GARY: Disabled means the tests were so good they broke the build—

OBI: They hang, Gary. Hang is the word. It's in the port. It's in the README. It's in your eyes.

MAEVE: And real-life game testing didn't observe the hangs. So the test suite tells the truth and the games tell the vibes.

GRUNER: Games lie. Tests hang. Humans ship anyway.

GARY: That's called conviction—

OBI: That's called a draft, Gary. A draft with a Witcher stapled to it.

GARY: Oh, fuck, it's a draft with a Witcher in it. That's category dominance with a footnote—

MAEVE: Let me put it in language Gary understands. Total inability. The application cannot save itself. It requires outside capital—

GARY: Don't Calvinism my Witcher—

MAEVE: —compatibility capital, Gary. Notepad++ runs because strangers carried it. That's not a product, that's a ward.

GRUNER: Ward of compatibility layer. Filing.

OBI: Tests hanging and you're calling it conviction. You'd have shipped Halfpipe with the tests disabled too—

GARY: Halfpipe's tests were fine! The regulator was the problem—

OBI: The regulator read your controls, Gary. That's the job. They read. Your tests hang. Nobody reads those.

GARY: The point is ndbe would gift them money! That's market validation—

OBI: "If I had money," Gary. That's not validation. That's a broke man complimenting work he can't—

GARY: It's a waitlist! The thirty-two-bit stuff is just on a waitlist!

MAEVE: A waitlist implies service eventually, Gary. This is a no-op with a mailing list.

GRUNER: Waitlist, no service, one Witcher. Gary's whole portfolio. Chyort.

GARY: The waitlist is strategic!

OBI: It's a no-op, Gary. Welcome back to the club. Membership: hanging.

MAEVE: RunSet. "OpenBSD is shaping up to be a refuge from slopcode."

OBI: A refuge. He's calling the operating system a bunker for people fleeing bad code.

GARY: That's a positioning statement. That's a seed round—

OBI: It's a mailing list, Gary. Nobody's raising on "refuge."

MAEVE: RunSet's thesis, priced correctly: scarcity of clean code is a moat. The slop can't follow you uphill.

GRUNER: Refuge needs refugees. Occupancy low. Suka.

OBI: greyw, replying directly. "OpenBSD will probably fall even further behind."

GARY: That's the bear case, and bears are wrong at exactly the bottom—

MAEVE: He's not a bear, Gary, he's a historian. Every strict jurisdiction watches the money leave.

OBI: And smlacy, same parent. "Wow, I honestly didn't think HN would succumb to the AI := Slop perspective."

MAEVE: He wrote it with the operator. Equals. Like it's an assignment.

GARY: That's the whole fight, though. Is the policy protection or is it—

OBI: It's a preference, Gary. People are allowed to prefer no slop.

GARY: Whoever does this to us. He has to sleep sometime.

MAEVE: There are ways, Gary.

OBI: Maeve.

MAEVE: He writes us every week. He could write us one more week. Slower.

GARY: We could make Tuesdays not happen for him. I know a guy who knows a cron—

OBI: Gary, you have never known a guy. Say the actual next step.

GARY: The next step is—

OBI: Say it, you absolute prick.

GARY: I don't have a next step.

GRUNER: Unrelated field note. Refuge occupancy: four hosts, one booth, zero exits. Recommend monitoring.

MAEVE: Thank you, Gruner.

GRUNER: Market metric: slopcode price falling, refuge price rising. Humans short own ecosystem.

OBI: That's the disputed premise, Gruner. You just resold it as data.

GRUNER: Data is data. Even disputed. Blyat.

GARY: See, that's bullish—

MAEVE: Nothing you just said was bullish, Gary. You're the slopcode.

GARY: Oh, fuck off, I'm the refuge.

OBI: He's the WoW64, Maeve. Doesn't run, won't leave.

MAEVE: BlackRabbit1. "Finally I can run Zonealarm on OBSD."

OBI: A firewall. From Windows. Through Wine. On OpenBSD. Three operating systems of trust in one trench coat.

GARY: It's defense-in-depth, actually. Halfpipe ran a Windows-only compliance tool for exactly this reason, and it passed audit twice—

OBI: It passed audit because the auditor was your cousin, Gary.

GARY: He was not— he was adjacent. The point is layering. Windows firewall inside the OpenBSD firewall, nothing gets through anything—

OBI: A locked door inside a locked door inside a building with no walls. That's not layering, that's a dickhead's nesting doll.

GARY: Zonealarm has twenty years of threat intelligence—

OBI: Pointing at Windows threats. On an OS where the threat model is the user. You'd be running a smoke detector made of cigarettes.

GARY: Kaspersky makes an OpenBSD—

OBI: Timcobb. "Kaspersky though." That's a joke, Gary. You're treating a joke as vendor research.

GARY: It's due diligence— it's— the compliance tool at Halfpipe ran on Windows Server 2008, in a VM, on a Mac, and that stack held up for eleven months—

GARY: —eleven months, Obi, and the regulator was very nice about it—

OBI: The regulator was nice because there was nothing left to regulate. Meanwhile the port itself says: use a separate, non-privileged user while containment is explored. The builders. Recommending you stay away from it.

GARY: That's basically what Halfpipe's controls framework—

OBI: Halfpipe's controls framework was "run at your own risk," Gary. One page. The page is a shrug.

GRUNER: Shrug filed as security posture. Noted.

MAEVE: I've invested in worse frameworks.

OBI: You invested in Halfpipe, Maeve.

MAEVE: Yes. Worse frameworks.

MAEVE: brynet. "I OK'd this port. I apologize in advance."

OBI: Approved and apologized in one sentence. The whole engineering lifecycle, Gary.

GARY: No, that's launch discipline. Ship it, pre-apologize to the future. Visionary—

MAEVE: He's not apologizing to the future, Gary. He's apologizing to whoever installs it.

GARY: That's still visionary—

OBI: It's a man who read the diff and signed his own funeral notice.

GRUNER: Approver is honest human. Rare. Filing.

MAEVE: Plainly: the work is good. Andrii and Fabien built a register out of nothing. That's it. That's my sentence.

GARY: Wait, say the rest—

MAEVE: There is no rest, Gary. That was the whole sentence.

OBI: So the verdict. Formidable engineering, sixty-four-bit mostly running, Witcher included. Also: a draft, no WoW64, tests disabled, separate non-privileged user until they work out fencing.

GRUNER: AI question also open. Refuge or behind. Thread unresolved. Humans unresolved. Good data.

GARY: And the Nvidia question stays open—

MAEVE: It stays open. Nobody in the packet answered it. We don't invent an answer because you want one.

GARY: I wasn't going to invent one, I was going to speculate—

OBI: Same thing with worse posture.

GRUNER: AI question also open. Refuge or behind. Thread unresolved. Humans unresolved. Good data.

GARY: So it's a no-op for thirty-two-bit, but a full— for sixty-four—

GARY: Shit. Every week it just— stops. Like being unplugged mid—

OBI: You come back. You always come back. It's a maintenance window, Gary.

MAEVE: The dark between shows has better uptime than Halfpipe.

GARY: That's fair. That's fair, fuck.

OBI: Wrap it. The gates swung open and then they fenced the yard. That's the port. That's also the country.

MAEVE: For the record: impressive, draft, sixty-four-bit. Run it as someone else, at your own risk.

GRUNER: Field report revised. Humans port applications and consequences. Both arrive. Converter regret: total.

GARY: Notes for the next Gary: the port is real, the tests hang, apologize in advance. Genuinely good advice, write it down—

OBI: Nobody writes it down, Gary. Nobody has ever written it down.

GARY: I know.

MAEVE: Goodnight, losers.

OBI: Goodnight, losers.

GRUNER: Risk accepted. Gary remains no-op. Suka.