Willy Tarreau
I recently stumbled upon this llama.cpp fork which supports AMD Radeon Instinct MI50-32GB cards ("gfx906"). That made me discover this card, and notice that some of them were amazingly cheap, around $250 used. The 16GB variant is even cheaper, around $100. I had long been watching AI-capable...
Willy Tarreau
BackgroundThere are plenty of nice devices these days designed around ARMv8.2 SoCs such as RK3568 or variations around RK3588. Many of them have been using the HYM8563 I2C RTC chip for about a decade. This device is reasonably cheap, requires few components, consumes very little power and is long...
Willy Tarreau
Baby steps are importantFour years after I wrote about some improvements brought to my Eleksmaker laser engraver, I made quite a lot of progress on multiple fronts.Laser moduleI was regularly annoyed by the too irregular laser beam and finally acquired a NEJE A40640 model that's supposedly 15W...
Willy Tarreau
BackgroundBack in April, the hardware news site cnx-software featured a very nice new small Linux board called Breadbee, that was designed and still being developed by one of the site's readers, Daniel Palmer (aka 'dgp'). The board has many unique particularities that appealed me:it is small, very...
Willy Tarreau
Background After having successfully built a few tiny USB batteries in the past, I was always left with a bit of frustration about the difficulty to build them. My previous model has been working flawlessly for the last 2.5 years now despite the hackish way it was built, that's undeniably a...
Willy Tarreau
After starting to use my laser engraver, I found a few points that really needed to be improved. [Update-2024-07-30: new resolution and accuracy improvements described here: https://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2024/07/improving-laser-engravers-resolution.html ] Seeing under the piece First, when...
Willy Tarreau
It all started while following some links... I was having a look at a review for a new single board computer (I don't remember which one) with a link to the Banggood site, and in the suggestions I saw some inexpensive laser modules. Clicking on them by curiosity revealed this appealing laser...
Willy Tarreau
Purpose After creating the 3rd version of my build farm I figured the cooling was not optimal due to the thermal tape having a non negligible resistance. I sketched an idea of a variation of the cooling system involving a thick aluminum thermal plate to conduct the heat to a large heatsink. The...
Willy Tarreau
[this is a follow-up to this article on version 2 of the build farm] Background The MiQi-based build farms had been running very well both at home and at work over the last 2 years. I noticed that some very large files in haproxy totally dominate the build time (notably cfgparse.c), and can keep...
Willy Tarreau
Goal A while ago I purchased a Linksys WRT1900ACS-v2 router to replace my aging 15-years firewall (still running kernel 2.4 on an old VIA Eden board!). This device is pretty nice, it's fully supported by Linux mainline, it offers multi-gigabit connectivity with a real CPU (Marvell Armada 385), has...
Willy Tarreau
Context My digital camera (Canon A2100 IS) uses 2 AA cells as its power source, as can be seen on the photo below from the review site above : This was one of the reasons why I selected this model, because I didn't want to have to discover that the battery is depleted when I need it, and AA...
Willy Tarreau
What's the purpose ? Every developer even remotely interested in performance regularly needs multiple physical machines to test the effects of various optimizations. I'm no exception to this, on my desk lie a number of fanless Atom and ARM boards serving as load generators and web servers when I...