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Eva Winterschön

prose

reflections on OSS, HPC, and Ai/ML engineering, with occasional considerations on Cognitive Neuroscience

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    Musings

    Emotive

    Photography

    Logistics

    Episode 42: "We're leaving. Take only what you need to survive!"

    ETA, 2 hours till movers arrive, in yet another episode of… “Take only what you need to survive”, and they’re packing up everything else for transit. Countdown to California thereafter.

    Goodbye to another location. I suppose that I could say that Chicago was beneficial in the larger sense of existential purposes, and that much was accomplished, sure sure.

    However, and not in jest, nearly the entirety of those accomplishments could have occurred in an old military quonset hut located off-grid, deep in the vast stretches of the Northern Nevada desert, preferably near the …

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    Photography

    Memories of a Younger Era — Tokyo Hiroshima Kyoto

    Memories of Japan are easy to get lost in, the time period was often a blur. Capsule hotels, bullet trains, insomnia, and several neuro-cognitive mods offering symbiotic boosts to perception. An immediate realization dawned upon landing, so many people seem to love tall western women, to be quite vocal in appreciation and awareness, and hey that’s me!

    Those were memories of a pure, simple existence, the joy of living in a beautiful foreign land with a wonderfully kind culture; one where I could not read a single sign, nor understand more than several helpful conversational phrases. A …

    Musings

    Engineering

    System Migration Complete, and Now it's Cherry Time

    Sunday offers an EOD and EOW wrap up thoughts, with some meandering grammatical expressionism. Present state of this week’s hardware resource aggregation into one of the LLM research boxes is… 98%. The data migration from earlier today is complete, with ZFS offering some enjoyable numbers.

    zpool scrub cranking out 19.6G/s, with 2.74T scanned at approx 2min, with the pool predicting a total of 38min to complete

    While building the spec and futzing with the BOM, one of my priorities was to ensure zero PCIe lane contention, with I/O going direct to 64 cores at 3.5GHz peaks, and …

    Industry

    Engineering

    Need more PCIe slots, not more lanes, but slots.

    Staring at this board, mentally converting PCIe lane count to device requirements, only to consider that yet again…

    It’s 2025. We’re still using the PCIe slot standard for most motherboards, even on enterprise boards. Who’s doing this right, at least marginally so?

    ASRack (brain, please grow up and stop making elementary jokes) has been putting four physical x16 slots on their “Deep mini-ITX” series of server boards, to which are added two x8 lane Slim-SAS and two x4 lane OcuLink headers. These can be used for a variety of SFF fan-out connection purposes. …

    Industry

    Women's Safety Online: Why I'm No Longer on LinkedIn or Twitter

    The vast and varied subject of Women’s Safety Online is a topic which impacts many facets of daily life, including emotional and physical well-being. This post is not a primer on the concepts, rather it offers a short timeline to explain why I am no longer on LinkedIn or Twitter social networks for reasons of personal safety and privacy.

    A Tenuous Timeline

    1) Some years prior to a decade ago, I joined LinkedIn, and a small handful of years ago I joined Twitter.

    2) Along the way a serious incident occurred, resulting in PTSD from a bodily assault; the details of which require privacy. …

    Industry

    Engineering

    Linux

    The demise of Fedora as a Developer Distro

    The Q4-2024 through Q2-2025 cycle has been one of remarkable instability for Fedora kernels and systemd breaking-changes. F40 through F42 have offered more crashes, more kernel panics, and more core dumps than any triple-set of versions since its dawning into existence - and I’ve been running this distro for dev-only boxes since the first release.

    In the worst of circumstances, Fedora notified me of a firmware update, which was a hands-off type of “reboot to install” EFI blob which bricked my Thinkpad X1 Nano laptop just last week. That’s an expensive failure and one …

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    Photography

    🌐 Nvidia Ai Cluster for Traveling 🌐

    A little travel cluster, all set for Ai engineering and development.

    • 1x Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX 16GB
    • 3x Nvidia Jetson Orin NX 16GB
    • 3x GoWin R86S 6005 + CX5 25G OCP 2.0
    • Various network hardware

    Setup in a Pelican Air case, ready for the flight!

    #ai #engineering #development #nvidia #cluster #jetson #travel

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    Photography

    Engineering

    🌐 Weekend Hardware Update 🌐

    Some additional reorganization time this weekend, all busy with the process of preparing the HomeLab for another interstate relocation. Having decided to repurpose some hardware to create a new router, this one formerly hosted infra VMs several years ago, but now it’s going to run a pair of “BSD Router Project” VMs for on-host H/A, and a bit of packet shuffling between hosts for RDMA on RoCE v2, iSCSI, and a few shared NFS mounts for compute hosts, along with the usual firewall and packet filtering, some Wireguard, OpenVPN, and Zerotier, NTP + PTP via GPS/GNSS.

    Here’s a …

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    Photography

    Engineering

    🗑️ Import Your Failures! 🗑️

    While using Soundcloud the other day, prompted by a little helper fellow which states:

    “Import your Spotify Playlists!”

    ok, sure. I’d like to use a single app for music if possible, and I prefer Soundcloud to Spotify in general. So, I click ok and authorize the apps' APIs to do their thing.

    It finishes importing. Great, back to work. Life goes on. Days later, that being five minutes ago, sitting at my desk… “time for some metal” and decide to play a near-daily favorite, “Heaven Shall Burn” compilation playlist which consists only of their …

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    Musings

    Emotive

    Photography

    Memories of Harmonic Distortion, Descending Carson Pass

    While training for The Death Ride one year, so many years ago, I had quite a surprise on Highway 88 while descending Carson Pass in the Sierra Nevada. This was in the late season, the last week of October, a last minute plan with a best friend to get one last ride in before the snow storms arrived. On top of the usual physical challenges of climbing ~2,500' vertical up to 8,575 elevation, it was uncommonly cold.

    For the background, I loved endurance racing, and the many long, standing (not seated) hill climbs and mountain passes always were my favorite. Climbing the front-side and then heading …

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    Musings

    Photography

    Engineering

    💻 Mozilla Thunderbird - The Failure of a Once Great Client 💻

    Thunderbird, wtf are you doing where you need 83% CPU plus ~50GB (virt) and 20G (res) of RAM allocated?

    The entire mailbox isn’t even 1GB in total size. Yet here it is, cranking out all of this nebulous processing 24/7… literally 24/7 it’s running loads like this for months now. Generally I ignore it because the workstation has a modern EPYC with 32 cores and 128GB of RAM, so it’s not completely crippling my usage… but sometimes it does, and sometimes I want that 50/20GB split to not be around, and I want those clock cycles and L1/L2 cache doing something …

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    Photography

    4am Dev Box - GPU & RDMA Hardware Shuffle

    Some photos from a bit of 4am dev box maintenance earlier this morning, focused on hardware reallocation and consolidation to maximize PCIe lane utilization.

    This box will host one VM using full PCIe passthrough on the GPUs and 50% NPAR for the NIC ports, and four smaller VMs. Storage for the VMs will be host-level ZFS on the two P3608, split up as several zvol allocated to the smaller VMs for a RoCE-v2 storage micro-cluster, replication to off-host network based storage also using RDMA.

    The GPU compute VM will be running our agentic-consensus LLM models, continuing development into deeper …

    The non-Controversial Controversy of BTRFS

    Some clarifications on some points here about the history of BTRFS as it relates to Oracle, Sun Microsystems, RedHat, ZFS, and a DARPA funded filesystem research project which concluded with a ghastly murder.

    Oracle bought Sun to get the ZFS file system. They have been porting ZFS features into Btrfs. The head of the Ext4 file system project, an Oracle employee, said that Ext4 was just a temporary stepping stone on the way to Btrfs.

    1. A primary motivation for Oracle’s acquisition of Sun was to obtain and control the IP for the MySQL database project, which had been obliterating a large …

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    Industry

    Photography

    Engineering

    💾 Updates on Remote Access to POWER9 💾

    Some quick progress notes for a few FreeBSD and OpenZFS devs, which will be accessing one of my POWER9 systems.

    See photos for visual reference.

    • Separate L1 and L2 domain for all network access, zero-shared DMZ, unconnected to the rest of the RFC99 lab lack
    • Mikrotik router has been temporarily slapped into place on the side of my lab rack, directly in back of the Talos II system (dual socket, 144 threads of fun!), using PoE for the main link
    • PiKVM v3 is being cabled up for a jump box, will connect to the Mikrotik switch ports
    • Talos II’s OpenBMC will be connected to the Mikrotik switch …

    Industry

    Engineering

    ⚒️ Linux Kollektivs - Oh Please ⚒️

    I love a lot about the linux world, and there’s a lot of positive aspects to the kernel itself, which has brought a lot of joy over the years, with kernel module development, debugging, tuning, analyzing… specifically for my career, but also on a personal level. For one quarter of a century I’ve been using Linux and BSDs in many different flavors, but there’s an accelerating trend in the corporatized linux space which has been quite concerning.

    The marketing trends used by The Big Names over the past decade remind me far too much of Cold War propaganda, of the lies …

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    Photography

    🩷 Good Morning Stormy Spring Weather 🩷

    #chicago #morning #photos #stormy #sleepy

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    Neurology

    🤯 "Hyper-Focal Pre-Optimization" 🤯

    Coders from all over likely already know of this quote, or would certainly would benefit from perma-copying this quote to the front of their brain-stem/visual-cortex knowledge queue:

    “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” ― Donald Ervin Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms

    So then, what’s this about Hyper-Focal in relation? It’s when one builds a “maladapted neurological reward-center structured pattern of behavior”.

    IOW, it’s a learned behavior from which one has associated a perceived positive emotional …

    Industry

    FreeBSD Articles 2025 Q1 [projektierung]

    These are the topics that I’ve been spending time with, on no specific schedule, with no intended intention, often for debugging or optimization, sometimes purely for curiosity, and often in-between other tasks throughout the day and night, so they might as well get some blog posts for discussion. All of the topics have already been written via configs, scripts, list-docs, and automation tooling, but no formal blog posts just yet.

    1. Ongoing sprints in “The EPYC Epic, Desktop Cooling Round III, Software Settings”
    2. An Enterprise Engineering Desktop w/ FreeBSD: hardware, software, …

    Musings

    Emotive

    💖 Siren Song of the UltraSparc 💖

    02:42, awoken to first-morning, 4hrs sleep
02:55, at home office standing desk
02:58, navigate to eBay once more
02:59, search Sparc M7 T7-2 chassis
03:08, begin writing silly poem
03:12, resume eBay search
03:16, distracted by dtrace for tcshrc
03:20, distracted by view of Lake Michigan
03:22, return to Mastodon post-form
03:28, distracted by tcsh config options
03:32, review work emails, updates too
03:44, move poem to 'nb' program
03:50, resume timeline planning for work
04:30, paste to micro-blog, click 'post'

nocturn lucid state of mind, nor-aware
to this living within, this living dream …

    Industry

    A Minor Commentary on SED/Opal Encryption

    Data-At-Rest Encryption is a common topic, but one which is often misunderstood. Having led engineering and architectural efforts involved with hardware standards for encryption compliance, including detailed analysis of performance impacts while operating in accordance to service level agreements, here are some bits of discussion on the SED/Opal implementation.

    TL;DR

    • SED/Opal TCG spec’d drives are doing just fine. I trust it more than LUKS2 by a long shot.

    Detailed Read

    I have no issues trusting NAND and SAS firmware for the drive controllers that I’ve personally validated as …

    Performance & Regressions -- How Orgs Ship Code to Production

    See that image? Right around the mid-section we see a common problem with the manner in which code is shipped to production. That one little section, displayed as a subsection of “build & packaging”, happily named “regression + performance testing”. Whether the product is a user-facing site, or middle-ware component, or baremetal systems which provide cloud resources that we all know and (sometimes) love… the success of the product is gated by an org’s ability to prioritize testing and automations for “Performance XOR Regression” (some orgs …

    Everyone Loves Ansible

    Test post. The variable value specifies the vicissitudes of vectorized validity of variablities.