The Question Nobody Asked (But I’m Answering Anyway) I have an IBM POWER8 server from 2014. It has 160 hardware threads. It draws 400W at idle. It sounds like a jet engine warming up. I compiled .NET 8 from source on it, then built Jellyfin 10.11 in nine increasingly desperate attempts, and now it’s streaming movies to my living room. My wife thinks I have a problem. She’s correct. But that’s not the point. ...
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. ...
You Need a .NET SDK to Build a .NET SDK That’s the first thing you learn when you try to compile .NET from source. It’s a beautifully circular problem — like needing a car to drive to the dealership where you’re buying your first car. Microsoft ships pre-built SDKs for x86_64, ARM64, and s390x. But POWER? IBM’s legendary architecture that runs half the world’s banking systems? Sorry — you’re on your own. ...