Talos

Some boys arrive at the ranch and you hear them before you see them. This one arrived and we never saw him at all — not for half an afternoon, anyway. The fault was not his. The fault was a cable that lied. The forasteiro showed up on a Tuesday. ARM64. RK3588. Eight cores, an NPU nobody at the ranch had drivers for, dual 2.5G Realtek NICs, one M.2 slot, one SATA port, sixteen megabytes of SPI NOR flash. He’d been living in Debene Ranch for months already, under a different name — Rock NAS, dressed in Armbian, serving ZFS over NFS like a proper homestead servant. But Dom Felipe had retired him from that job. The kid wanted something else. ...

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 The villains: an outdated kernel, UKI silently ignoring extraKernelArgs, and a vendor BIOS that thinks PL2=75W is a reasonable default for a chip rated for 115W.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. ...