Hardware Podcasts

Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi

Oxide and Friends · 23 Jan 2025 · 1h 50m · Episode 3

What this episode covers

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.

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Oxide Computer Company, Joyent, AMD, Chelsio, Murata
Chips
T6
Tools
DTrace, MDB, KMDB
Also
AGESA, Redfish, UEFI, BIOS, PCIe, Spectre, Meltdown

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The summary, chapters and topics are generated from the episode’s audio by this directory, not written by Oxide and Friends. The episode itself belongs to its publisher.