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Latest Hardware Reviews

The Pine64 Star64: RISC-V's Baseline Problem

 · 19 min read

The Pine64 Star64 runs StarFive's JH7110 - four SiFive U74 cores and an ISA string of rv64imafdc, which is RV64GC baseline and nothing more. It compiles Rust in 461 seconds, tenth of eleven on my bench, beating the Orange Pi RV2 with half the cores, matching its own JH7110 twin the Milk-V Mars to within 0.02%, and losing to a quad Cortex-A53 from 2012. On SHA-512, where nobody has hardware, it is only 5.9x behind a Cortex-A76. On AES-128-GCM it is 100x behind. That difference is the whole story - plus a hardware crypto engine sitting stranded behind missing userspace plumbing.
Recent
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 Philosophy The Same Bad Luck, Quietly: Why a Fleet of Cheap Boards Feels Flakier Than One Old Xeon  · 15 min read

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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.
Hardware Reviews

Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro Review: A 10-Gigabit Router Board I Put to Work as a Bastion

 · 21 min read

Hands-on review of the Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro, a MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) router board with quad Cortex-A73, dual 10GbE, and 8GB RAM running OpenWRT. Benchmarked for what a router actually does - CoreMark 9533/37952, ~1 GB/s hardware AES, GbE line-rate networking, 50C under load - and deployed as a real SSH bastion and nginx reverse proxy. A different animal from a compute SBC, reviewed as one.

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 →