Chapter VI

Hardware & host

The physical layer. Choosing the box, partitioning the disk, deciding what the host OS owns vs what gets virtualized.

Recipes in this chapter

Bare-Metal Setup

One Linux box, picked once, lives for years. Spec it for the workload that already gives you grief, not the workload you imagine you'll have someday.

Disk Layout with LVM

Two NVMe drives, one volume group, one growable home. The installer's default LVM is a trap. Lay this out by hand once and you'll never have to resize on a Sunday afternoon.

Kernel Tuning for an Always-On AI Host

Six sysctl knobs, one I/O scheduler decision, and a swap policy. Almost everything else the kernel ships with is fine. The defaults are tuned for "every workload," which means they are tuned for none.