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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

Not quite. A traditional mainframe is highly integrated, to the point of allowing hotswapping of CPU and memory. Oxide seems to be a fairly standard collection of x64 hardware, with a proprietary management software sauce.

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Just to expand slightly, "proprietary" in the sense of "built by us for this computer," but not in the way that free or open source software developers speak of the word "proprietary," the vast majority of what we do is MPL licensed, to the degree that it is actually possbile.

Out of curiosity, is there a list of those things that can not ot could not be licensed thusly and why?

In some cases, it's derived work of open source but non-MPL'd code -- but the ones that Steve is referring to are where we have third-party proprietary firmware. There aren't a ton of these (and in almost all cases, we ourselves don't have source code). We have (naturally) tried to minimize these, but as a concrete example: every AMD CPU has a PSP that runs proprietary software; we deliver that as a binary blob given to us by AMD (it's delivered over SPI to the host CPU).

Can you expand on what is not MPL licensed? I recall (foggily) reading about struggles with incomplete data sheets for Nuvoton controllers & I see the discussion about CVEs for NXP microcontrollers with secret patch ROMs.

See Brian’s excellent reply to your sibling.

One of our core product goals is to actually allow relatively hot swapping of individual compute sleds. It's true that each sled is an x86 server, but there's control software managing the whole rack as a unit, with live migration of workloads and replicated storage. The architecture of the whole thing leans towards treating sleds as essentially like CPU and memory (and storage) boards in previous generations of large scale computers like mainframes.

This is the case for some .

Like the Tandem Nonstop series. (Now part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise) I had a contract with a 9/11 call handler for a while. They had one of them (or possibly more). On display of sorts through a window of bulletproof glass.

The IBM Z series does not allow hot swapping the CPU and I dont believe it ever did. The parts on the Z Series are super easy to replace. All in nice components sitting on a rails to yank in or out.

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