342: That Girl's Brain

Embedded.fm · 27 Aug 2020 · 57m · Episode 342

What this episode covers

Jessie Frazelle, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Oxide Computer, explains how the company builds open-source, rack-scale servers for enterprises by adopting hyperscaler-style hardware design. She details the decision to open-source firmware and hardware to eliminate vendor finger-pointing and security vulnerabilities inherent in proprietary BMCs. The discussion covers their use of Rust for firmware and control plane software, power efficiency metrics like PUE, and the challenges of deploying high-density compute in traditional colocation environments.

Mentioned

Companies
Oxide Computer Company, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Dell
Products
Docker
Chips
AMD, ARM, RISC-V
Also
Open Compute Project, Open19, OpenBMC, Rust, Go, BMC

Other shows on the same ground, closest first.

  • Oxide and Friends · 2h 02m

    Shipping the first Oxide rack: Your questions answered!

    Oxide founders Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck, joined by Adam Klabnik, discuss the shipping of their first commercial rack-scale computer, explaining that the product is an on-premises cloud infrastructure solution designed to offer hyperscaler-level elasticity without the public cloud. They address skepticism about the business model by highlighting the growing need for data sovereignty, latency reduction, and cost efficiency for large enterprises, arguing that owning infrastructure makes economic sense at scale. The founders detail the technical necessity of building custom hardware and firmware together to solve power efficiency, cooling, and support issues inherent in commodity server stacks, while also defending their choice of Illumos and their decision to build a robust, open-source hypervisor rather than relying on VMware or Firecracker.

  • Oxide and Friends · 1h 24m

    Open Source Firmware

    Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company discuss the Open Source Firmware Foundation with founders Christian Walker and Philipp Deppenwiese of 9elements. They explore the history of the Open Source Firmware Conference (OSFC), the industry shift from proprietary to open source firmware driven by security concerns like Spectre and Meltdown, and the technical challenges of dealing with binary blobs in SoCs. The conversation highlights how customers like HPE are using purchasing decisions to enforce open source firmware, accelerating the transition in the hardware industry.

  • Oxide and Friends · 1h 50m

    Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi

    Robert Mustacchi, a co-founder and key engineer at Oxide Computer Company, discusses the company's holistic approach to building rack-scale servers, from board design to firmware. He details the engineering challenges of eliminating BIOS/UEFI by reverse-engineering AMD's AGESA code, debugging the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in early Joyent systems, and resolving a PCIe link training failure on the T6 NIC during manufacturing. Mustacchi emphasizes the importance of hardware-software co-design, deep system observability, and anticipating operational issues like firmware upgradability before they occur.

  • The Amp Hour · 57m

    Finding Hardware Flaws with Laura Abbott

    Laura Abbott, an engineer at Oxide Computer, discusses her accidental discovery of a buffer overflow vulnerability in the ROM update mechanism of the NXP LPC55S69 microcontroller while working on Oxide's server root of trust. She explains how Oxide is rebuilding the server from the ground up with a focus on hardware security, utilizing their open-source operating system Hubris and the Rust programming language to mitigate risks like memory safety issues. The conversation covers the architecture of the server's secure components, including the service processor and TrustZone-M, as well as the challenges of remote hardware debugging and contributing to the Linux kernel community.

  • Oxide and Friends · 1h 49m

    Potpourri: Product, Platform, Paravirtualization

    Brian, Adam, Josh, Rick, and other Oxide Computer Company founders discuss the architectural decisions behind building a rack-scale computer from the board up, including the choice to integrate a custom P4-based switch and use a cable backplane to avoid the pitfalls of commodity networking. They recount technical challenges such as the NCSI protocol's security flaws, the decision to abandon the Tock OS in favor of Hubris, and the complexities of managing distributed block storage and live VM migration. The conversation also covers their approach to open source, specifically the values mismatch with OpenTitan, and the product management philosophy of solving acute pain points before building tooling.

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