# Nodeau Self-Hosted Alpha — please read this first

Nodeau Alpha is early software. It is useful, it is honest about what it does,
and it is not finished. This page says exactly where the edges are, because
finding them yourself at 1am is a worse experience.

## What is actually supported

| | |
|---|---|
| Operating system | **Ubuntu 24.04 LTS**, native install |
| Architecture | **x86_64** only |
| GPU | **NVIDIA** only, one GPU |
| Machines | **one** |
| Runtime | **llama.cpp** |
| Fully profiled model | **Qwen3-8B Q4_K_M** |

Anything outside that list is untested, not "probably fine".

## What "profiled" means, and why it matters

Nodeau refuses to deploy a model it cannot predict the memory use of. That is
the point of the product — it would rather say no than let you discover the
problem as a crash loop.

Alpha ships **one fully measured model profile**, measured on an RTX 3080. On a
GPU we have not measured, Nodeau will tell you it has no validated profile for
your configuration instead of inventing numbers. That is a real limitation, and
it is deliberate.

## What Nodeau will never do to your machine

- It will **not** install, upgrade, downgrade or remove your NVIDIA driver.
- It will **not** disable Secure Boot or enrol keys.
- It will **not** modify your bootloader or kernel command line.
- It will **not** touch Windows partitions, or mount NTFS.
- It will **not** delete a Kubernetes cluster it did not create.
- It will **not** expose inference to your network. The endpoint binds
  `127.0.0.1` only, and there is no option to change that in Alpha.
- It will **not** send us anything. There is no telemetry.

## Known limitations

- **One GPU, one machine.** No multi-node scheduling, no multi-GPU.
- **No scale-to-zero, queueing or cloud overflow.**
- **WSL is not supported.** The installer detects it and refuses cleanly.
- **macOS and AMD GPUs are not supported.**
- **The local endpoint lives in your login session.** It survives closing the
  terminal, but stops when you log out unless you enable systemd lingering
  yourself. See the troubleshooting guide.
- **Day-to-day commands currently use your kubeconfig.** Narrowing that is
  tracked and is not finished.

## What we are not claiming

Nodeau Alpha is not production infrastructure. It has no uptime guarantee, no
failover, no support SLA, and it is not hardened for hostile multi-tenancy. If
you are putting something important on it, don't — yet.

## Reporting problems

`nodeau support bundle` produces a sanitised archive: no API keys, no
kubeconfig credentials, no prompts, no model output, no weights. Read it before
you send it — it is a plain tar.gz and that is a reasonable thing to want to
check.