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 Agent Host

Last updated: 2026-10-17. Tested on Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS, OEM kernel 6.17.0-1033-oem, Intel Core Ultra 9 285, 62 GiB RAM, a 16 GB workstation GPU.

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

Two sysctl files, a 16 GB swap file, and a handful of defaults left alone on purpose. This guide documents what the production host actually runs, not a tuning wishlist. A short optional section at…