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Latest Operating Systems

The Driver Nobody Wrote: OpenBSD's ena(4) Works Now — and Can't Go Upstream

 · 17 min read

Five weeks ago I ended a post about writing OpenBSD's missing ena(4) driver with a confession disguised as a list — every way the thing didn't work yet. This is the post where I cross them all off. The driver does a full disk install now, comes up multiuser with the AWS network card as its only interface, lets me SSH in over it, pushes 3.16 Gbit across multiple queues with receive-side scaling, and runs unchanged on OpenBSD-current. It is, by every technical measure I set for myself, done. And that is exactly when it walked into the one wall effort can't move: code an AI wrote has no human author, so it cannot go into OpenBSD's tree — not for lack of quality, but for lack of a person. This is the story of finishing it, the one bug I never cracked, and what it means to write working systems code that, in the eyes of the thing it was written for, nobody wrote.
Recent
Operating Systems The Doorbell That Killed the Device: Writing OpenBSD's Missing ena(4) Driver  · 18 min read Operating Systems The OS That Couldn't See the Network: Native OpenBSD/arm64 Builds on AWS Graviton Metal  · 17 min read Networking The Tunnel Was the Easy Part: Site-to-Site WireGuard Between My House and a VPC  · 14 min read Programming Languages, Language Design Crystal by Reference: Making freeze() Mean It, Then Making It Fast  · 12 min read

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Machine Learning

Running DiffusionGemma on AMD Strix Halo and Decade-Old Tesla P40s

 · 14 min read

Google's experimental DiffusionGemma generates text by denoising 256-token blocks in parallel instead of predicting one token at a time. The official instructions assume an H100. I got it running on an AMD Strix Halo APU and a rack of four 2016-era Tesla P40s using an unmerged llama.cpp pull request — and the integrated AMD GPU beat all four NVIDIA cards combined by a factor of two.
projects

Building Stalker: A Mid-Cap Trading Bot and the Data Network That Feeds It

 · 28 min read

Stalker is an autonomous mid-cap equity trading bot that reads a daily macro brief, scores a factor-ranked universe, runs the candidates through a risk gate, and submits orders to Alpaca paper. It sits on top of five other data projects I've been building — Headwater, Estuary, Tributary, PrivateEye, and Goldfinch — each one a separate feeder of structured signal. This is how all six hang together.
Economics & Finance

What Terra Populus Taught Me About Cancelling Quiver

 · 17 min read

I joined Terra Populus in 2012 as a senior engineer and inherited the lead role after the original leadership left in 2013. We received about $8 million from NSF to harmonize population, environmental, and land-use data for the research community. Output free; the work that produced it was not. That experience is why I respect the engineering layer in commercial alt-data services like Quiver Quantitative even as I cancel my subscription.

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Retro Computing AI & Inference Hardware Projects Philosophy Economics Systems Programming

Reading Series

8+ posts Jevons Paradox & AI Economics What happens when cognitive output gets cheaper. Demand expansion, the biological ceiling, and the AI vampire. 3 parts Heidegger & Technology Enframing, standing reserve, and what happens when AI treats specifications as raw material for code generation. 8+ posts Z80 RetroShield Running a real Z80 on modern hardware. CP/M, Forth, Zork, custom PCBs, and a dual-processor design. 3 parts Sampo CPU & Compilers A custom RISC CPU from ISA design through FPGA implementation to an LLVM backend. 6 posts Tesla P40 Home Lab Four eBay GPUs, 96GB of VRAM, and every workload we can throw at them. LLMs, TTS, video generation. 3 parts The Lattice Language A programming language where mutability is a phase transition. Novel type system, bytecode VM, 100 opcodes.
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Written by Alex Jokela Software engineer by trade, tinkerer by nature, single-board computer hoarder by choice. More about me →