Hardware
The hardware in the lab, grouped by architecture. Each page says what the thing is and why it’s here, with specifications and preserved documentation where they exist.
SPARC
The question that keeps coming up is whether you can still run current Solaris on real SPARC at home. You can: Oracle licenses Solaris 11.4 for personal, non-production use, but only on SPARC T4 or later and Fujitsu SPARC processors, which makes an M10 roughly the newest hardware a hobbyist can do it on.
- Fujitsu SPARC M10-1 A SPARC64 X server.
POWER and PowerPC
People arrive at POWER asking two different questions. On the modern end it is trust and price: the Talos II exists because the owner can audit and rebuild its firmware, and it costs accordingly. On the vintage end it is survival: mainline Linux still boots on a Power Mac G5 if you work at it, while the Efika's distribution packages have quietly disappeared from the mirrors.
- Apple Power Mac G5 A PowerPC 970 workstation.
- Genesi Efika PPC A small 32-bit PowerPC board built around the MPC5200B.
- Raptor Computing Talos II A POWER9 workstation with owner-controlled firmware.
RISC-V
Ask which RISC-V board to buy and the honest answer is a question back: to do what? The catalog runs from dollar-and-change microcontrollers to 64-core workstations, and the standing advice is to start in QEMU and buy silicon only when emulation stops being enough. The silicon here covers both ends: a Linux-capable board with PCIe, an RV32 microcontroller, and RISC-V cores sharing a die with FPGA fabric.
- Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit RISC-V cores next to FPGA fabric on one die.
- SiFive HiFive Unmatched A RISC-V development board built around the Freedom U740.
- SiFive HiFive1 Rev B An RV32 microcontroller board built around the FE310.
MIPS
People looking for real MIPS hardware to learn the ISA get pointed at discontinued boards on eBay, or told to settle for an emulator. The MIPS hardware that is still everywhere is network gear: OpenWrt turns a small MIPS board into a useful always-on Linux box, and Cavium Octeon routers picked up a second life as cheap big-endian MIPS64 hosts that boot from a USB stick with nothing to brick.
- Onion Omega2 Pro A small MIPS board built around the MediaTek MT7688.
- Ubiquiti UniFi Security Gateway A gateway appliance used here as a MIPS64 host (Cavium Octeon).
Arm
Arm at home usually starts with a Raspberry Pi and the discovery that a cluster of them teaches Kubernetes better than it serves anything; the recurring tax is software that only ships for x86. The interesting machines sit past the Pi: network boards that run mainline Linux as a router or a KVM host, and Mac minis, where a container on macOS quietly means a Linux VM underneath.
- Apple Mac mini Models from 2011 through 2020, Intel through Apple silicon.
- Raspberry Pi An assortment spanning several generations.
- Traverse Ten64 An eight-core arm64 network board built around the NXP Layerscape LS1088A.
x86-64
Second-hand rack servers are the cheapest serious compute you can buy — a dual-Xeon R730 goes for a few hundred dollars — and every thread about them lands on the same two costs, watts and fan noise. Decommissioned firewall appliances are the same bargain in a quieter shape: ordinary x86 boxes that run whatever you install on them.
- Apple Mac mini Models from 2011 through 2020, Intel through Apple silicon.
- Dell PowerEdge R730 An x86-64 rack server.
- Dell PowerEdge R740 An x86-64 rack server, a generation newer than the R730.
- Sophos XG/SG 210 rev 3 x86-64 appliances, running Linux as firewalls.
Xtensa (ESP32)
Most ESP32 questions turn out to be battery questions: why deep sleep is drawing milliamps, which LED or regulator on the board is eating the budget, how to stretch hours into days. The recurring project is the low-power dashboard: wake, fetch something over Wi-Fi, redraw an e-paper screen, go back to sleep.
- Inkplate 6 An ESP32-driven e-paper display.
- Unexpected Maker TinyPICO An ESP32 board in a very small footprint.
FPGA
Two questions dominate: which board for a beginner, and what works with the open toolchain. The Lattice ECP5 is the usual answer to the second — yosys and nextpnr handle it end to end, trading some logic and speed against the vendor tools — and a board this size hosts a RISC-V soft core comfortably; people have run Linux on one. At the other end sits Microchip's Libero-driven world, where the recurring question is simply how to get started.
- Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit RISC-V cores next to FPGA fabric on one die.
- ULX3S A Lattice ECP5 board supported by fully open FPGA toolchains.