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llmgw/deploy/bootstrap
Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5 634f87ba15
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Provision nodes with the host CPU model
Proxmox defaults a VM to kvm64, which hides AVX, AVX2, FMA and even SSE4.2
from the guest. llama.cpp then loads libggml-cpu-x64.so — its scalar
baseline — instead of the backend built for the host's instruction set, and
an inference node is not slightly slower but unusable.

Measured on node05, an 8-core VM on a Xeon E5-2680 v4, same weights, same
thread count, the only change being --cpu host:

  Qwen2.5-Coder     kvm64   host
  1.5B q4_K_M        5.80  39.09  tok/s
  3B   q4_K_M        2.90  20.51
  7B   q4_K_M        1.33   9.88

Prompt processing went from 7.6 to 143.8, a factor of nineteen.

This cost an afternoon because nothing looks broken. The node registers, the
engine starts, the replies are correct; every number is just small, and the
conclusion that suggests itself is that CPU inference is hopeless rather
than that the VM cannot multiply efficiently. A 14B model at 1.7 tokens a
second was nearly written off on that basis.

The trade is live migration, which a VM pinned to the host CPU cannot do.
For a node whose job is arithmetic that is the right way round, and --cpu
overrides it where it is not.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-16 20:42:48 +02:00
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