Friday, December 31, 2021

OS of Interest: Hubris

 Hubris is a fledgling operations system by Oxide Computer Computer.  They are developing it de novo (as Bryan Cantrill would say, and probably has) for use in the control systems of their new server hardware.  It's an embedded OS suitable for MCU's with memory protection hardware.  To quote Bryan:

When we started Oxide, we knew we were going to take a fresh look at the entire system. We knew, for example, that we wanted to have a true hardware root of trust and that we wanted to revisit the traditional BMC. We knew, too, that we would have our own system software on each of these embedded systems, and assumed that we would use an existing open source operating system as a foundation. However, as we waded deeper into these embedded systems and especially their constraints of security and robustness we found that what we wanted out of the existing operating systems wasn't necessarily what they offered (or even wanted to offer).

Cliff Biffle seems to be the chief designer.

Saturday, January 02, 2021

Electronics of Interest: LPC55S69 MCU with Transform Engine allowing for co-processor FFTs

 The NXP LPC55S69 includes a PowerQuad" feature that can be used to accelerate DSP functions, including FFTs

A variant of this chip is used in Great Scott Gadget's HackRF SDR, though apparently that uses a number of other chips to do signal processing work.