RISC-V: an ISA you are allowed to read
The Server SoC, Boot and Server Platform specifications are ratified. What makes it interesting is the specification being nobody's property, rather than the instruction set itself.
architecture
A control list is a system requirement
Since October 2022 the specification of an accelerator you are permitted to buy has been written partly in Washington, in units of processing power and interconnect bandwidth. Export control used to be a legal department's problem. It is now a line in the architecture, and it is the first time in this notebook's span that a chip's spec sheet has been set by policy.
Galaxy-scale engineering, and why we named it Andromeda
We have rebuilt the same platform layer for every client we have ever taken on. This year we stopped. Andromeda is the internal name for the component framework underneath, and the name is an argument about scale: the structure that holds a hundred machines together has to be the one that holds four.
Firecracker: the virtual machine came back smaller
Containers won on ergonomics and spent the decade paying for the boundary they gave up. The answer that arrived in 2018 was a smaller virtual machine rather than a stronger container: tens of thousands of lines of Rust, a boot measured in milliseconds and a device model with almost nothing in it.
ARM reaches the server room
The architecture monoculture is ending, and that sits upstream of almost everything interesting in systems work. The hard part was never the instruction set; it is fifteen years of software that has only ever been built on one.
