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Latest Hardware Reviews

The MangoPi MQ Pro: One RISC-V Core, Two Hours, and What That Actually Proves

 · 12 min read

The MangoPi MQ Pro compiles the pinned benchmark in 7,824 seconds, two hours and ten minutes, which is 149x the fleet leader and dead last of twelve boards. But the interesting numbers are elsewhere: per core it is only 4.2x behind a SiFive U74, its 486 MB of RAM never became the bottleneck because being single-core kept peak memory to one rustc, and getting Rust onto it at all required a Debian chroot because OpenWrt is musl and rustup ships no musl-hosted compiler.
Recent
Hardware Reviews The Pine64 Star64: RISC-V's Baseline Problem  · 19 min read Hardware Would You Pay for RISC-V? Doing the Arithmetic in Public  · 14 min read Operating Systems A Mac, Two Disk Images, and an SSH Prompt: OpenBSD 7.9 on the Raspberry Pi 4B  · 13 min read Operating Systems Two Addresses, One Page: Finding the Firmware Bug Behind NetBSD Corruption on the Milk-V Mars  · 16 min read

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Philosophy

The Same Bad Luck, Quietly: Why a Fleet of Cheap Boards Feels Flakier Than One Old Xeon

 · 15 min read

My single-board computers hang, drop USB, and eat SD cards in ways my old Xeon server never does, and "you get what you pay for" is a shrug, not an explanation. So this is an attempt at the actual explanation: where the money goes in a server-class machine, why none of it shows up on a spec sheet, and why the same bit flip that increments a counter on the Xeon becomes an unwitnessed mystery hang on a NanoPi. Power delivery, SD card physics, tablet silicon versus mainframe silicon, Google's DRAM study, one Heidegger digression, and the parts of the missing margin you can buy back with a real power supply, a watchdog timer, and three idle boards' worth of Kubernetes.
Hardware Reviews

FreeBSD on a 2011 MacBook Pro: Fifteen Years of Progress, and Per Core It's a Tie

 · 18 min read

I put a 2011 MacBook Pro running FreeBSD 15.1 through the same Rust compile benchmark as my single-board computer fleet. It lands sixth of nine at 131.00s - behind a Raspberry Pi 5, ahead of a Banana Pi CM5-Pro. But normalized per core and per gigahertz, a 2011 Sandy Bridge core and a 2023 Cortex-A76 do the same amount of work to within 0.3%. Also: why SHA-256 is 5.7x slower here, how the ZFS ARC nearly sold me a 2.86 GB/s hard drive, and two benchmark results I threw out.
Programming Languages, Software Architecture

The Config Language That Was Already There: A Ballistics REPL Written in Lattice

 · 18 min read

Every serious calculator eventually grows a configuration language — YAML, TOML, a bespoke parser — and then grows the loop of frustration that comes with it. This is what happened when I refused to write that layer, and instead made an existing programming language do the job: a stateful ballistics laboratory written entirely in Lattice, driving a Rust solver over a process boundary, with no native extension and no C ABI. A case study in what you get when the scripting language and the config language are the same language.
Software

The Bullet Doesn't Go Where You Point It

 · 8 min read

A bullet fired at a target a thousand yards away does not travel in the direction you aimed it. It falls thirty feet, drifts a foot sideways from its own spin, and gets nudged by the rotation of the Earth. This is a piece about the Rust engine I wrote to predict all of that — how you test physics when you have no oracle, why the hard bugs were never in the equations, and the one problem worth charging for: solving ballistics backwards.
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.
Operating Systems

Four Partitions and a Borrowed Bootloader: NetBSD on the Milk-V Mars

 · 17 min read

NetBSD now runs on my Milk-V Mars: 28 GB root filesystem, gigabit Ethernet at 0.0% packet loss, SSH like any other machine on the shelf. It is the only documented NetBSD Mars I'm aware of, and getting there took a weekend of archaeology: a vendor bootloader whose advertised boot logic is dead code, a QEMU time machine built from Debian's snapshot archive, an SD card doubling as a flight recorder, a serial console that demolished every blind theory in ten minutes, a kernel panic caught with full backtrace, and a filesystem-corruption incident I caused myself by "fixing" a safety mechanism I hadn't understood. The final fix for the whole device-tree saga is one line in a U-Boot defconfig. The whole build is scripted and reproducible; a flashable image is next.

Topics

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 →