♡ Eva Winterschön ♡ @winterschon@bsd.cafe
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💻 Hello Old Friend, Talos II 💻

This was my first IBM POWER9 system, acquired in 2020 and built for home/desk use. Dual socket SMT4 Sforza, 144 threads, 256-512GB RAM, various storage/net/accelerators over the years. [1]

As expected, I fell in love and acquired four IBM Power System L922-2U [2], which are presently in the colo awaiting network rebuild (remote hands this time).

The Talos II has served a variety of purposes, with most of its time running FreeBSD PPC64le (&a bit of PPC64be for fun). Sometimes also Linux, back when I was tearing into qemu code for compiler optimization hypothesis testing, RTX GPU passthrough, +validating assumptions about qemu on P9/le handling amd64 & arm64 emulation.

So, out of storage! Into the rack! New user accounts! But first it needs updated OS drives (the 3x 64GB SATADOM in Raid-Z1 need to be repurposed), and a NIC (25G-DP CX-5 or X710-DA4).

- [1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER9#R
- [2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER9#I

@dexterMichael Dexter electricity comes next 🧠

Eva's Talos II system, sitting on a storage push-cart, resting atop a 48 port switch for fun and ... "ESD protection?"... in transit back to its proper home. Top-Down view inside of Eva's Talos II system, featuring dual IBM POWER9 SMT4 Sforza SKU, with a total 144 hardware threads (4 threads per core). A front view from one of Eva's "HomeLab spill-over into the colo"... server racks, with a pink overlay box indicating the location of three IBM LC-922 Power9 systems. Above those are various Dell PowerEdge servers and an Arista DCS-7060CX-32S switch (ports facing rear). Located at the base of the rack is an APC UPS and APC ATS, handling automated failover of facility / battery power sources for casually "some-9s of uptime" high-availability compliance.
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