Hardware Podcasts

Emulating Oxide: How Faux Can You Go?

Oxide and Friends · 11 Sept 2026 · 1h 24m · Episode 19

What this episode covers

Steve Karam, Andrew Stone, and Rain Paharia from Oxide Computer Company explain how their emulation environment, VOXEL, accelerates the development of rack-scale hardware and multi-rack software. They detail the use of SoftNPU to emulate Tofino switches and an emulated Service Processor (SP-EMU) to run stock Hubris firmware, allowing them to test complex scenarios like Trust Quorum and system updates without physical hardware. The team highlights how this high-fidelity virtualization, combined with a new commissioning API, has unblocked critical engineering work and enabled rapid iteration on their Helios host infrastructure.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Intel, Barefoot, Oracle, GitHub, Amazon, Red Sox, Jays
Products
VOXEL, SoftNPU, Gimlet, Sidecar, Hubris, Helios, Falcon, Omicron, Propolis, Wicket, Dendrite, Maghemite, Crucible, Nexus, SLED agent, Trust Quorum, DDM, BGP, P4
Chips
Tofino, STM32
Tools
Claude, LLM, Rust, Dropshot, Progenitor
Also
Illumos, Solaris, Ken Burns, John Boy, Kevin, Paulina, Eric Austin, Ryan Goodfellow, Robert, Ben Stoltz, Eliza, Trey, Garrett Gayoros, Gergely Orosz, Cliff Biffle, Andrew Stone, Rain Paharia, Steve Karam, Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal

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