Sergio López's Blog
After rescuing and restoring a lovely Amiga 500 , I decided to look for another old computer to restore. Commodore 64 machines are still relative cheap in the second hand market, specially when announced in unknown condition. So it’s time to test and fix this lovely breadbin Commodore 64, which is almost as old as I am! Photograph of a breadbin Commodore 64 "> Photograph of a breadbin…
Having a working Amiga 500 that’s able to run most classic games is nice, but having one that’s also able to run some of the newer software is much, much better. The Amiga 500 comes with 512 KB of RAM soldered on the board, acting as what it’s called Chip RAM . Let’s see how much we can add on top of that. RAM: The fast, the slow and… the chip? Being a newcomer to…
At the end of part 1 we had a clean Amiga 500, both in the inside and the outside, which we couldn’t test because the power supply that came with it was broken. With a brand new power supply here, it’s time to find out what it works and what it doesn’t. The first boot
While I’ve never been much of a collector myself, over the last couple years I’ve acquired a taste for retrocomputing content, avidly consuming the videos produced by people like The 8-Bit Guy , Adrian’s Digital Basement and Jan Beta , among others. I’m amazed by the love they put on testing and restoring all kinds of old computers, and it’s definitely contagious. So,…
Being able to run AI models locally is one of the coolest tech things 2023 brought to the table. But given the extremely heterogeneous software stack for AI accelerators , doing that in an efficient way on your own laptop is not always as easy as it should be. For instance, if you’re running macOS on an Apple Silicon machine, you can easily build llama.cpp with its Metal backend and offload…
It’s been almost a year since I transitioned from the Virtualization to the Automotive team at Red Hat with the goal of ensuring RHIVOS ships with a powerful Virtualization stack. While there’s a large overlap between a Virtualization stack for Servers and the one for Automotive platforms, the latter is much more demanding on one particular aspect: GPU acceleration . For me,…
There’s this interesting idea of adding support for running Wasm/WASI payloads in libkrun , which is something we could easily achieve by simply embedding a Wasm runtime, statically built for Linux, into initrd . Now, the problem with this approach is that, despite having a payload (the Wasm runtime) with a well-known behavior, we would still be using a (built with a minimal config, but…
Sometimes, while working on macOS, you may find the need to test something quick on Linux, or use some utility that’s only available on this OS. But, of course, you don’t want to go through all the process of creating the VM from scratch. The good news is, you don’t need to! Using krunvm you can create and start a microVM from a regular container image (that is, an OCI image), in…
Are you feeling adventurous today? Good, so let’s give a try to some of the coolest upcoming technologies. podman is a tool for managing containers. If you’re familiar with docker , you’ll find it’s CLI quite similar. RHEL8 will include podman as part of the container-tools module. Kata Containers is an OCI Runtime which runs containerized processes inside a VM, using…
As I wrote on my previous post, Enabling HYP mode on the Raspberry Pi 2 , the newest machine from the Raspberry Pi Foundation features a Cortex-A7 with Virtualization Extensions, but it isn’t possible to make use of such feature out of the box. In that article I showed that it was possible to start the kernel in HYP mode. Now, I’ll cover the rest of steps needed for enabling KVM…