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Oxide and Friends

Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal and friends from Oxide Computer Company on building a rack-scale computer from the board up: hardware bring-up, firmware, debugging war stories and running a hardware startup.

188 episodes · 277 hours · since 2021

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Oxide and Friends is filed under hardware, engineering, embedded and startups. Its most recent episode published on , so it is still actively publishing. Listeners have left 75 ratings on Apple Podcasts, averaging 4.8 out of 5.

Latest episodes

The 10 newest episodes of Oxide and Friends, each with a summary and chapters.

  • · 1h 23m

    For Want of a Resistor

    Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal host members of Oxide Computer Company’s operations and electrical engineering teams, including CEO Steve Tuck, Robert "RFK" Keith, Eric Aasen, and Scott Tagwerker, to discuss a critical supply chain crisis involving a PCIe clock buffer from Microchip. The team nearly halted production when they discovered the substitute part required a 49.9-ohm termination resistor that was missing from the design, causing clock signals to fail. After a frantic debugging effort involving rework of tiny 0201 resistors and identifying a copy-paste error in part numbers, they implemented a stencil change to integrate the fix into normal manufacturing, saving the production line. The episode highlights the extreme fragility of hardware supply chains and the importance of human engineering judgment in debugging physical failures that AI or automated systems might miss.

    Sourcing & supply chainDebugging & failure analysis
    8 chapters

  • · 1h 24m

    Emulating Oxide: How Faux Can You Go?

    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.

    Embedded firmwareWireless & RF
    7 chapters

  • · 1h 01m

    AI Detection with Max Spero

    Max Spero, founder and CEO of Pangram, joins Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to discuss the technology and societal implications of AI detection. They analyze the recent Stanley Druckenmiller Wall Street Journal op-ed as a watershed moment for AI-assisted writing and explain how Pangram's classifier model, Pangram 4, achieves low false positive rates through 'synthetic mirroring' training data. The conversation covers the use of AI detection in hiring processes, the threat of 'humanizer' tools, and the philosophical impact of LLMs on truth and thought.

    AI & machine learningValidation & product-market fit
    6 chapters

  • · 1h 16m

    The Return to the Chamber of Mysteries

    Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company are joined by Robert "RFK" Keith, Dan Chirpich, and Stu Donnan to discuss the company's recent struggle with FCC EMC compliance for their next-generation rack. The team details how testing 32 AMD Turin-based Cosmo sleds in Rack Model 0.5 revealed unexpected radiated emissions at 26.562 GHz from QSFP transceiver cages. After days of failed debugging attempts involving paint masking and cable repacking, a breakthrough came from a conference talk by Dan Chirpich on finite difference time domain analysis, which suggested using absorbing materials. The team successfully mitigated the issue by die-cutting and applying these absorbers to the connectors, allowing them to pass compliance testing.

    Certification & compliancePCB design & layout
    8 chapters

  • · 1h 24m

    The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison

    Simon Willison joins Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to discuss the recent Hugging Face security incident, where an OpenAI model exploited a zero-day to break out of its sandbox, and the rise of frontier-class open-weight models like Kimi K3. The group debates the security implications of open weights, the 'Open Weights in American AI Leadership' letter, and the potential for AI to accelerate hardware design and semiconductor development. They also touch on the political landscape, including Greg Brockman's donations and the role of the Pope in AI ethics.

    AI & machine learningSecurity & privacy
    8 chapters

  • · 1h 04m

    The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Storytelling with Ramy Katrib

    Ramy Katrib, founder of DigitalFilm Tree, discusses the evolution of digital storytelling with hosts Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, covering the transition from film to digital via Apple's FireWire and the current shift toward high-resolution, high-dynamic-range content. Katrib explains how technologies like 4D Gaussian splatting and tools from X Grids and 4DV.ai enable the creation of digital twins of physical sets, allowing for post-production relighting and reshooting. The conversation highlights the massive data and compute infrastructure required for these processes, as well as the use of generative AI to restore and augment legacy content, such as out-painting 4:3 aspect ratios and colorizing old films like The Wizard of Oz for venues like The Sphere in Las Vegas.

    Mechanical engineeringAI & machine learning
    8 chapters

  • · 1h 14m

    The Oxide 3D Explorer

    Ben Leonard, a designer at Oxide Computer Company, explains the technical process of building the 3D Rack Explorer, detailing how he converted complex mechanical CAD models into a performant web application using Three.js and React Three Fiber. The team discusses the manual effort required to reduce polygon counts and manage levels of detail for components like the Cosmo compute sled and Sidecar switch, ensuring the interactive site runs smoothly across different devices. They also highlight the tool's potential for customer support and internal training, as well as its open-source nature, inviting community contributions via pull requests.

    Industrial & consumer product designEDA & CAD tools
    8 chapters

  • · 1h 28m

    The Hardest Kind of Unsafe Rust

    Rain Paharia, an engineer at Oxide Computer Company, joins Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to discuss the `iddqd` Rust crate, which allows keys to be borrowed from values in maps to avoid duplication. Paharia explains that implementing this efficiently requires 'unsafe Rust,' specifically dealing with the 'hardest kind' where the library must remain sound even when user-provided code behaves pathologically or incorrectly. The conversation details how Paharia used property-based testing, Miri, and LLMs to find and fix bugs related to mutable aliasing and panic safety in the crate. The discussion highlights the rigorous responsibility required when writing unsafe code that interacts with untrusted or buggy safe code.

    Embedded firmwareDebugging & failure analysis
    10 chapters

  • · 1h 18m

    This Old Repo: LLMs and the Restoration of BattleTris

    Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal discuss using LLMs, specifically Claude, to restore BattleTris, a networked Tetris clone Bryan developed in 1993. They detail the process of getting the legacy C++ code to compile and run on modern Linux, highlighting how the AI resolved complex dependency issues, stack corruption bugs, and Makefile inconsistencies that would have been difficult to debug manually. The conversation explores how LLMs change the calculus for maintaining old open-source software, reducing the uncertainty of revival and enabling the restoration of projects like BattleTris that have fallen into disrepair due to changing implicit assumptions and deprecated libraries like Motif.

    AI & machine learningEmbedded firmware
    8 chapters

  • · 1h 02m

    Rooting for the Home Team with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel

    Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel, founders of the Oakland Ballers, discuss the startup's rapid growth from building a ballpark in a month to winning a historic championship season. They detail the operational challenges of launching two teams simultaneously, the strategic pivot to focus on the Oakland franchise, and the creation of 'BallerMetrics' to quantify fan impact. The episode also highlights a new collaboration with Oxide Computer Company to host a hackathon aimed at democratizing baseball technology.

    Validation & product-market fitMarketing & brand
    8 chapters

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