Homelab

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. ...

🎬 ABERTURA Câmera abre num galpão escuro. Luzes piscando. Som de cooler. Ao fundo, uma silhueta masculina com 24 cores se forma na fumaça. É ULTRA2. Plim plim. Entra a música tema: 🎵 “Detalhes tão pequenos de nóóóós… Um swap que ninguém pediu, um kernel que não rodóóóu…” 🎵 CAPÍTULO 1: A CHEGADA DO FORASTEIRO Era uma noite quente em Debene do Sul, pequena fazenda de servidores às margens do Rio MoCA 2.5. Dona Felipe, matriarca da família e dona de todas as terras (e dos /24 inteiros, que ela mesma fez questão de subnetar com as próprias mãos), recebia um forasteiro vindo de longe. ...

🎬 OPENING CREDITS Camera opens on a dark warehouse. Blinking lights. Sound of cooling fans. In the background, a masculine silhouette with 24 cores forms in the mist. It’s ULTRA2. Plim plim. (That’s the iconic Brazilian soap opera sound effect.) Theme song plays: 🎵 “Such tiny details of us two… A swap nobody asked for, a kernel that wouldn’t boot through…” 🎵 CHAPTER 1: THE STRANGER ARRIVES It was a hot night in Debene Ranch, a small server farm by the MoCA 2.5 River. Dona Felipe, matriarch of the family and owner of all the land (and all the /24 subnets, which she personally configured by hand), received a stranger from afar. ...

TL;DR — A new Intel Core Ultra 9 285H (“ultra2”) joined my homelab this week. First Geekbench 6 run scored 1471 single / 12864 multi. That’s slower than the i7-12900K next to it on the rack. Six hours, two Talos upgrades, three diagnostic jobs, and one DaemonSet later, single-core jumped to 3090 (+110%). The villains: an outdated kernel, UKI silently ignoring extraKernelArgs, and a vendor BIOS that thinks PL2=75W is a reasonable default for a chip rated for 115W. Here’s how the diagnosis went. ...

I needed 40 Gbps between two machines: intel9: Ubuntu 24.04, running K8s + misc services xeon2zfs: TrueNAS SCALE 25.10.3, serving storage via NFS The plan: Deploy InfiniBand FDR (40 Gbps), run IPoIB for network services, eventually layer NFS over RDMA if I felt fancy. The hardware: Two Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro cards from eBay ($20 each), one unmanaged QDR/FDR switch ($35), some cheap QSFP cables. Should be plug-and-play, right? VPI cards, support both Ethernet and InfiniBand, auto-negotiate, just works™. ...

There’s a moment in every homelab evolution where you stop and ask: what am I actually buying when I buy infrastructure? For me that moment came two weeks ago, staring at a renewal email from a SaaS I won’t name, doing back-of-the-envelope math on a Synology I almost ordered, and pricing out an EKS cluster for a side project that — let’s be honest — was never going to leave my apartment. ...