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Latest Hardware Reviews

The SpacemiT K3: RISC-V Finally Competes, and the Vendor Kernel Gets in the Way

 · 20 min read

The SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX is the first RISC-V board on my bench that competes with ARM instead of apologising to it. It compiles Rust in 161.8 seconds, beats a Cortex-A76 on AES-GCM and SHA-256, and does 2.37 GB/s of hardware-accelerated crypto where the Pine64 Star64 manages 21.7 MB/s. It also cost $1,175.09 delivered, partitions its 16 cores into two clusters of 8 that no single process can span, and cannot run KVM at all because the vendor kernel oopses when you load the module.
Recent
Hardware Reviews The MangoPi MQ Pro: One RISC-V Core, Two Hours, and What That Actually Proves  · 12 min read 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

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Operating Systems

Two Addresses, One Page: Finding the Firmware Bug Behind NetBSD Corruption on the Milk-V Mars

 · 16 min read

NetBSD booted on my Milk-V Mars, joined the network, and then overwrote its own kernel with pkgsrc file data under sustained write load. The evidence first pointed at a double allocation inside UVM. That diagnosis was wrong. A custom PGAUDIT kernel, a Mars-shaped QEMU target, 256 permanent canary pages, and a controlled cache-flush experiment in DDB eventually showed two physical addresses exactly 4 GiB apart reaching the same DDR backing. The unsafe 8 GiB map came from a blank EEPROM and U-Boot SPL's private memory default. This is the sequel to my original bring-up article: the wrong theories, the two device trees hiding in one boot chain, the one-line firmware correction, and the 600-second hardware A/B that contained the corruption.
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.

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 →