Changelog Interviews From Sun to Oxide
May 22, 2024
Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Oxide Computer Company, shares insights from his journey spanning Sun to Oxide, discussing topics like building cloud servers, debugging latency issues, founding CFS, transitioning to Rust, forming Oxide, troubles with Dell machines, and the challenges of starting a new venture and fundraising.
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Yelling at Hard Drives Debugging
- Brian Cantrill and Brendan Gregg debugged a latency issue by yelling at a hard drive to observe vibration effects.
- The drive's latency spiked when screamed at, proving sound-induced vibration affects HDD performance.
Sound Vibrations Affect HDD Latency
- Hard drive read latency spikes because sound waves move the read/write head out of alignment.
- This subtle mechanical disturbance causes latency without affecting drive rotation speed.
Joining Sun and Creating DTrace
- Brian joined Sun Microsystems drawn by Jeff Barnwick's energy and shared frustration with Unix performance tools.
- They later collaborated to create DTrace and ZFS, foundational systems for observability and filesystems.