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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.
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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 Machine Learning Running DiffusionGemma on AMD Strix Halo and Decade-Old Tesla P40s  · 14 min read

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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.
AI

Architecture Verified, Mythology Intact: Running OpenMythos on a Strix Halo

 · 19 min read

Kyegomez published OpenMythos as a speculative, open-source reconstruction of Claude Mythos. I ran the 1B variant on a Strix Halo (Radeon 8060S, ROCm) to test what an open reconstruction of a frontier model can and cannot teach you. The architecture's internal claims check out: rho(A) at init is exactly e^-1, the spectral-radius stability constraint prevents the failure mode it's designed to prevent, and hidden states blow up exactly as the LTI analysis predicts. What it does not teach you: anything about Claude Mythos.

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Retro Computing AI & Inference Hardware Projects Philosophy Economics Systems Programming

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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 →