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Ken Shirriff

Unusual circuits in the Intel 386's standard cell logic

I've been studying the standard cell circuitry in the Intel 386 processor recently. The 386, introduced in 1985, was Intel's most complex processor at the time, containing 285,000 transistors. Intel's existing design techniques couldn't handle this complexity and the chip began to fall behind schedule. To meet the sche...

Oxide and Friends 1:28:37

Founder vs. Investor with Liz Zalman and Jerry Neumann

Oxide founders, Bryan and Steve, as well as Oxide investor, Seth Winterroth, were joined by Liz Zalman and Jerry Neumann, authors of the book Founder vs. Investor, discussing the collaboration and conflict in company formation. Adam was also present.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our guests included...

Marc Brooker

What Now? Handling Errors in Large Systems

What Now? Handling Errors in Large Systems MathJax = { tex: {inlineMath: [['$', '$'], ['\\(', '\\)']]} }; function vote(btn, choice) { const widget = btn.closest('.vote-widget'); widget.querySelector('.user-vote').textContent = choice === 'tick' ? '✅' : '❌'; widget.querySelector('.result').style.display = 'block'; wi...

Marc Brooker

Why Strong Consistency?

Why Strong Consistency? MathJax = { tex: {inlineMath: [['$', '$'], ['\\(', '\\)']]} }; Eventual consistency makes your life harder. When I started at AWS in 2008, we ran the EC2 control plane on a tree of MySQL databases: a primary to handle writes, a secondary to take over from the primary, a handful of read replicas...

Embedded 1:10:04

514: Just Turn Off All the Computers

Philip Koopman joined us to talk about embedded systems becoming embodied and intelligent. We focus on the safety considerations of making an intelligent and embodied device. Phil's new book is Embodied AI Safety: Reimagining safety engineering for artificial intelligence in physical systems. It uses robotaxis as an ex...

Oxide and Friends 1:37:52

Futurelock

We're big users of async Rust at Oxide, and recently we found (another) very odd and hard to debug pathology related to async Rust that we dubbed "Futurelock". Oxide engineers who diagnosed the problem join Bryan and Adam to describe Futurelock and discuss methods to identify and avoid it.In addition to Bryan Cantrill...

Fork Around and Find Out 1:13:37

Looking Forward with Tim Banks

Sidero and Oxide Kubecon NA event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oxidesidero-at-kubecon-north-america-2025-tickets-1538869282449Tim Banks will optimize your modem baud rate and kick your ass—respectfully. Then they'll teach you how to be a better person. Their career includes systems, sales, and many other...

Marc Brooker

DSQL: Simplifying Architectures

DSQL: Simplifying Architectures MathJax = { tex: {inlineMath: [['$', '$'], ['\\(', '\\)']]} }; Complexity is a choice. While we were designing and building Aurora DSQL, we spent a lot of time thinking about our experience building and running database-backed systems. We saw that building great, fast, cost-effective, hi...

Oxide and Friends 1:20:51

Books in the Box V

Revisiting an annual tradition--Books in the Box! Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends share book recommendations (and--sometimes--anti-recommendations). Take a listen if you're looking for your next read.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by some guests noted below:Previously, on Oxide and...

Embedded 1:17:20

513: I'm Sorry You Learned Something

Jason Turner of C++ Weekly and Empty Crate spoke with us about the joy of puzzles, the changing directions of an interesting career, and the C++ programming language. I mean, of course we talked about C++. But only a little. Jason recently published Programming Puzzles Big Book: 400 pages of fun for ages 7-99, a book o...

charity.wtf

How many pillars of observability can you fit on the head of a pin?

The "three pillars" are a lie that keep good engineers trapped inside a mental model from the 1980s, paying outrageous sums of money for tooling that can't keep up with the complexity of modern systems.

Marc Brooker

Fixing UUIDv7 (for database use-cases)

Fixing UUIDv7 (for database use-cases) MathJax = { tex: {inlineMath: [['$', '$'], ['\\(', '\\)']]} }; How do I even balance a V7? RFC9562 defines UUID Version 7. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move1. More seriously, UUIDv7 has received a lot of criticism, despite seemingly ac...

Ken Shirriff

Solving the NYTimes Pips puzzle with a constraint solver

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Embedded 1:05:30

512: What if I Didn't Stop?

Katherine "Smalls" Connell spoke with us about making thin and flexible circuits, making stretchable electronics, and running a successful Kickstarter. Katherine's Kickstarter: Sprite Lights LED Body Art (light-up tattoo). Katherine shares her makes, describing her build process for companion robots and other projects....

charity.wtf

Got opinions on observability? I could use your help (once more, with feeling)

No, I haven't finished writing the book yet. Yes, I have more questions. Please? 🙏🌈✨

Marc Brooker

Is Systems Research Really Just About Making Numbers Bigger?

Is Systems Research Really Just About Making Numbers Bigger? The Barbarian F.C. of systems research would be pretty cool. Lots of folks online have been talking about Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research by Cheng, Liu, Pan, et al this week. Maybe unsurprisingly, given the fact that I work in AI f...

Fork Around and Find Out 1:02:54

Staying Calm with Duffie Cooley

Sidero and Oxide Kubecon NA event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oxidesidero-at-kubecon-north-america-2025-tickets-1538869282449Duffie has lived through a lot. From multiple startup exits to big company changes. He stays grounded by remembering where he came from and what's important—people. This episode is...

Marc Brooker

Locality, and Temporal-Spatial Hypothesis

Locality, and Temporal-Spatial Hypothesis MathJax = { tex: {inlineMath: [['$', '$'], ['\\(', '\\)']]} }; Good fences make good neighbors? Last week at PGConf NYC, I had the pleasure of hearing Andres Freund talking about the great work he’s been doing to bring async IO to Postgres 18. One particular result caught my ey...

Embedded 1:22:56

511: Forty Trillion Divides

Chris and Elecia talk about the show overflowing to another bit, fight over vim vs nano, consider awards, discuss writing (and self-motivation), consider linear algebra on AI cores, encourage remote device quality assurance, describe design documentation, review timer multipliers, and consider changing chip vendors. A...

Embedded 1:04:46

510: The Secret Chip

Christina Cyr spoke with us about building cell phones, entrepreneurship, social purpose corporations, awards, lithium recycling, and her interesting career path. We talked about Christina's Cyrcle Phone, the related kit from dTOOR, and her CES Innovation Award. We also mentioned Fairphone in the section about social p...

Marc Brooker

Seven Years of Firecracker

Seven Years of Firecracker Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Back at re:Invent 2018, we shared Firecracker with the world. Firecracker is open source software that makes it easy to create and manage small virtual machines. At the time, we talked about Firecracker as one of the key technologies behind...

Fork Around and Find Out 1:20:41

Colocating Data with David Aronchick

David has worked on a lot of cool tech you know like Kubernetes and Kubeflow, and he's usually a few years ahead of the game. So getting to catch up with him about what he's working on now is probably something you'll want to know about before you have these problems. He has great insights in how to get companies to su...

Ken Shirriff

A Navajo weaving of an integrated circuit: the 555 timer

The noted Diné (Navajo) weaver Marilou Schultz recently completed an intricate weaving composed of thick white lines on a black background, punctuated with reddish-orange diamonds. Although this striking rug may appear abstract, it shows the internal circuitry of a tiny silicon chip known as the 555 timer. This chip ha...

Embedded 1:13:46

509: Swarmed by Engineers

Steve Hinch wrote a book about engineering, innovation, and business. He shares decades of wisdom gleaned from his career at Hewlett-Packard and Agilent as an engineer, manager, marketing director, and general manager. Steve's book is Winning through Innovation: Lessons from the Front Lines of Business. While mostly re...

Embedded 1:22:32

508: Descartes' Demon

William Griffin spoke to us about hardware-in-the-loop testing, simulation, terminology, learning complex topics, and books. We don't usually expand upon the show title but Wikipedia has a rabbit hole called Evil demon so there you go. Books mentioned: Make: Electronic Music from Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Homegrow...

Ken Shirriff

Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?

I was reading the latest issue of the journal Science, and a paper mentioned the compound Cr2Gr2Te6. For a moment, I thought my knowledge of the periodic table was slipping, since I couldn't remember the element Gr. It turns out that Gr was supposed to be Ge, germanium, but that raises two issues. First, shouldn't the...

Ken Shirriff

Here be dragons: Preventing static damage, latchup, and metastability in the 386

I've been reverse-engineering the Intel 386 processor (from 1985), and I've come across some interesting circuits for the chip's input/output (I/O) pins. Since these pins communicate with the outside world, they face special dangers: static electricity and latchup can destroy the chip, while metastability can cause ser...

Fork Around and Find Out 1:04:17

Building Trust with Sean Goedecke

Come find Justin in-person and get FAFOFM stickers!Devopsdays - Portland, OR - September 8-10. Get 20% off tickets with FAFOFMEdgecase - Gooiland Hilversum, NL - September 24Taloscon - Amsterdam, NL - October 15-16KCD UK - Edinburgh - October 19Kubecon NA - Salt Lake City, UT - November 9-12Have an opening? HIRE AUTUMN...

Marc Brooker

Dynamo, DynamoDB, and Aurora DSQL

Dynamo, DynamoDB, and Aurora DSQL MathJax = { tex: {inlineMath: [['$', '$'], ['\\(', '\\)']]} }; Names are hard, ok? People often ask me about the architectural relationship between Amazon Dynamo (as described in the classic 2007 SOSP paper), Amazon DynamoDB (the serverless distributed NoSQL database from AWS), and Aur...

Marc Brooker

LLMs as Parts of Systems

LLMs as Parts of Systems Towers of Hanoi is a boring game, anyway. Over on the Kiro blog, I wrote a post about Kiro and the future of AI spec-driven software development, looking at where I think the space of AI-agent-powered development tools is going. In that post, I made a bit of cheeky oblique reference to a topic...