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Latest Operating Systems

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

 · 20 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.
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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 Operating Systems The Doorbell That Killed the Device: Writing OpenBSD's Missing ena(4) Driver  · 18 min read

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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

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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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 →