Welcome to the Exotic Silicon gemini capsule!

Exotic Silicon is a globally recognised IT research organisation, renowned for pioneering and applying new and novel ideas in business IT.

Drawing on over three decades of experience in the IT industry, Exotic Silicon was founded in 2016 to provide a unified platform for our groundbreaking research going forward.

Whilst IT research remains our primary focus, we now offer executive high-end commercial IT services to organisations with unique problems to solve.

> "We developed webpages in the 1990s, wrote CGI programs in Perl, and created WAP sites at the dawn of 3G..."

Commercial services

Executive IT services from Exotic Silicon

Research department publications

News and updates - the latest developments here at Exotic Silicon.

UTF-8 logic demystified - Write better UTF-8 parsing code! Crystal shares some techniques for shuffling her low level bits around.

Getting rejected! - Jay writes a greylisting filter in ~1000 lines of C that works with OpenSMTPD. Learn how it's done right here!

Feel my pins - Crystal shows us a new way to get exploited as she implements vcs-like devices on OpenBSD and discusses tactile terminals.

Console patchset - missing your 256 colours and other enhancements since upgrading to OpenBSD 7.3? Get our latest patchset right here!

Stuck in a rut - Jay bridges 4G LTE data to an OpenBSD server, in this combined review and tutorial of the RUT-240.

Unbreaking UTF-8 on the console - Want to learn how not to write code? We rip apart broken UTF-8 logic from the OpenBSD codebase. It's not pretty.

Unimpressed by /dev/null and /dev/zero? Let's see how to code some new memory special devices.

Eject command hacking - What exactly does the eject command do to a USB flash drive?

Console screendumps - Learn how to add new ioctls to the wscons code to implement a screenshot facility on the OpenBSD console.

X marks the (sweet) spot - tweaking the console emulation code to be more compatible with the terminfo entry for xterm.

From individuals to enterprise, you should all be backing up your data. Are you? Jay has some advice.

Crystal does optical - writing data to blu-ray discs and DVD-RAM using OpenBSD.

Assembler vs C - benchmarking the use of inline assembler for bit-shifting in the candlelit console patchset.

Candlelit console - adding a blue-filtered night mode, green-screen simulator, dim attribute, and more to the OpenBSD framebuffer console.

Resizing softraid volumes - Crystal Kolipe shows us how to do it, and finds a kernel bug along the way!

A reckless guide to OpenBSD - a new ten part series with Jay Eptinxa for intermediate to advanced users.

The Pinephone runs OpenBSD - Crystal installs OpenBSD on the Pinephone.

Crystal on the Pinephone - our resident Crystal Kolipe checks out the Pinephone, with mixed results.

Jay shows us how to relay mail from a VM to our LAN using pure SMTP and IPSEC, and without a static IP.

Jay follows up with another way to relay mail without a static IP, this time using SMTP over a wireguard tunnel.

SBC Bootcamp - bored with your X86 workstation but unsure where to start with the alternatives? Jay installs OpenBSD on the RockPI-4a.

Real programming - no third-party libraries, and no object orientation. Learn some real old-school procedural programming in C.

Design studio - learn how to develop beautiful and functional webpages, like those of Exotic Silicon.

Local patchsets - tweaking software to suit our needs. See our changes here before we submit them upstream!

Coffee-break article - ten-minute introduction to cryptography for assembler coders.

Website links

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Exotic Silicon commercial website

Exotic Silicon research website

> Most of the technology that's all around us now, was once only in the realm of enthusiasts, and trend-setters.

> A lot of our work today at Exotic Silicon still is.

> Become part of that trend-setting group.

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