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Latest Hardware Reviews

FriendlyElec NanoPC-T6N Review: The Fastest Board on My Bench, and the Benchmark That Outgrew Itself

 · 28 min read

Hands-on review of the FriendlyElec NanoPC-T6N, a Rockchip RK3588 SBC with 16 GB RAM, dual 2.5GbE, and a 6 TOPS NPU running Debian 13 on FriendlyELEC's BSP. It posts the fastest ARM compile time on my bench (52.55s), pushes 2.19 GB/s of AES-128-GCM, and never throttles - peaking at 56.4C under sustained eight-core load. Also the story of why my standard benchmark stopped being comparable to its own history, and what the microSD it shipped booting from is costing it.
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Operating Systems Four Partitions and a Borrowed Bootloader: NetBSD on the Milk-V Mars  · 17 min read Hardware Reviews Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro Review: A 10-Gigabit Router Board I Put to Work as a Bastion  · 21 min read Infrastructure Nothing Was Using the Cores: Three Idle Arm64 Boards, One HA k3s Cluster, and a BSD Build Farm  · 17 min read Operating Systems The Driver Nobody Wrote: OpenBSD's ena(4) Works Now — and Can't Go Upstream  · 17 min read

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Operating Systems

The Doorbell That Killed the Device: Writing OpenBSD's Missing ena(4) Driver

 · 18 min read

A weeks ago I wrote about getting native OpenBSD/arm64 builds on Graviton by refusing to let OpenBSD touch AWS's network card at all — running it as a QEMU guest behind a virtio shim, because OpenBSD has no driver for Amazon's ENA adapter. This is the other half of that itch: actually writing the driver. It's the story of getting ena(4) to attach, watching the device kill itself a few microseconds after every bring-up, chasing five increasingly exotic theories for why, and finding that the real cause was the most boring thing imaginable — I initialized a queue in the wrong order. Plus the part nobody writes down: what "working" actually means, and exactly how far from "done" that still is.
Operating Systems

The OS That Couldn't See the Network: Native OpenBSD/arm64 Builds on AWS Graviton Metal

 · 17 min read

I wanted native OpenBSD/arm64 binaries for a project that ships them, and assumed the answer was a Graviton instance. It isn't — OpenBSD's arm64 kernel has no driver for AWS's network card, so the instance boots into a void you can never reach. This is the story of getting there anyway: by refusing to let OpenBSD touch the cloud's hardware at all, running it as a KVM guest inside QEMU on a bare-metal Graviton host, and the two device-tree gotchas, the serial-console install I handed to an AI agent, and a last-mile build failure I confidently blamed on the wrong thing.
Networking

The Tunnel Was the Easy Part: Site-to-Site WireGuard Between My House and a VPC

 · 14 min read

I wanted to close a database's public port and reach it from my house as if the VPC were just another room. WireGuard did that in fifteen minutes. The other day and a half went to an IP-address collision I'd created years earlier, a load-balancing router quietly breaking the tunnel's return path, and the slow lesson that a VPN doesn't connect two networks — it makes you confront every assumption each made while pretending the other didn't exist.
Programming Languages, Language Design

Crystal by Reference: Making freeze() Mean It, Then Making It Fast

 · 12 min read

A programming language promised that frozen values couldn't change — and didn't keep the promise. The story of finding the holes, fixing them, and then collecting the reward: once immutability is actually enforced, you can stop copying immutable data and just share it. A case study in soundness, hidden bugs, and a 116x speedup, with lessons that apply well beyond one small language.
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.

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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 →