The Most Improbable Managed Node: Haiku in AWS Systems Manager
amazon-ssm-agent can’t run on Haiku. So I taught Haiku to speak SSM instead — 600 lines of C++, one very confused fleet console, and a BeOS-descendant desktop in my browser.
Alternative Computing
Running Modern LLMs on a 2016 IBM POWER8 in 2026
What Are We Even Doing Here? It’s 2026. Most people run LLMs on NVIDIA H100s, AMD MI300X, or at least a decent gaming GPU. I’m running them on a 2016 IBM POWER8 server with 160 hardware threads and zero CUDA cores. Why? Because I can. And because nobody else has published POWER8 LLM benchmarks in 2026. And because alternative architectures deserve love too. This post covers: Building llama.cpp on ppc64le with GCC 16 Running Qwen 2.5 7B (text + vision) on POWER8 NUMA tuning discoveries (spoiler: conventional wisdom is wrong) Multimodal inference (yes, vision models work too) Full reproduceability (Gentoo USE flags, build commands, everything) TL;DR: Got 6.81 tokens/s on text generation and fully functional vision inference. POWER8 reads license plates better than some humans. ...
Jellyfin on POWER8: 160 Threads of Media Serving
This is Part 2 of the POWER8 Saga. Part 1: What Microsoft Won’t Ship: .NET on POWER8 The Machine Before we begin — let me reintroduce the star of this show. The IBM S822 (8335-GCA) is a 2U rackmount server that IBM launched in 2014 for enterprise workloads. It was designed to run DB2, WebSphere, and SAP HANA. It cost somewhere north of $30,000 new. I bought it used for the price of a nice dinner. ...
34 Commits of Chaos: DayTrader, AIX, and Knowing When to Pivot
Previously, on “Man Yells at POWER8” In Part 1, I told you about the time I decided to run AIX 7.2 inside a KVM VM on a Gentoo ppc64le host, on actual IBM POWER8 hardware, in my basement in Chicago. I monkey-patched Python 2.7’s sqlitecachec.py to make yum work. I nuked my entire system by installing OpenSSL 3.5 instead of 3.0. I got WebSphere Liberty running and deployed IBM’s DayTrader 7 — a Java EE benchmark app from 2005 that speaks EJBs, JPA, JMS, and looks like it was designed by someone who thought JSP framesets were the pinnacle of web technology. ...
Running Enterprise Java on AIX 7.2 with POWER8 KVM in 2026
Why Would Anyone Run AIX in 2026? It’s February 2026. I’m staring at an IBM S822 (8335-GCA) in my basement rack — a dual POWER8 server with 128GB of RAM and 20 cores that can do 160 threads with SMT8. This machine used to live in a datacenter running enterprise workloads. Now it runs Gentoo Linux. Yes, Gentoo. On ppc64le. Compiled from source. All of it. But Gentoo wasn’t enough. I wanted to run the OS that this hardware was designed for — AIX. IBM’s proprietary UNIX that still powers banks, airlines, and telecom companies around the world. The OS that most people have only seen in architecture diagrams. The OS that costs more to license than my car payment. ...