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Platform support and requirements
A support level here is a claim about evidence, not about intent. Each row says what it rests on.
Support levels#
| Level | What it means |
|---|---|
| Recommended | What Nodeau is developed and measured on. Problems here are bugs. |
| Qualified | Run end to end on real hardware from the artifact a customer downloads, with named exclusions. |
| Experimental | Implemented, not qualified on hardware. Nothing sits here today. |
| Unsupported | Refused, or known not to work. Nodeau stops rather than half-working. |
Platforms#
| Platform | Level | What that rests on |
|---|---|---|
| Linux · NVIDIA — Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, x86_64 | Recommended | Several machines and four NVIDIA cards, through reboots, a power cut and a GPU swap between machines. |
| Apple Silicon — M-series Mac | Qualified | One machine, an M3 Pro, installed from the public path and serving on Metal. Earlier macOS versions are untested rather than unsupported. |
| Other Linux distributions | Unknown | nodeau install warns and continues. The pinned package versions are chosen for Ubuntu 24.04 and may not exist elsewhere. |
| Windows via WSL | Unsupported | The GPU path through WSL is genuinely different and has not been tested. install.sh detects and refuses. |
| Native Windows | Unsupported | No build is published. |
| Intel Mac | Unsupported | install.sh detects and refuses by name. Metal execution needs an M-series chip. |
GPUs#
| Level | Notes | |
|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA, on Linux | Supported | Nodeau enforces no minimum compute capability. Cards it has no measurement for are estimated conservatively, and the decision says so. |
| Apple Silicon integrated GPU | Supported | Through Metal, on the native execution plane. |
| AMD GPUs | Unsupported | A different runtime and memory story, not a configuration flag. |
| Intel GPUs | Unsupported | Same. |
Nodeau ships measured profiles for the cards it has run on and computes a figure for the rest from the model's own architecture and artifact size, plus a further margin. An estimate is never presented as a measurement — see admission.
How much VRAM you need#
The curated catalog is arranged on a hardware ladder, and every model states which rung it is on:
| Rung | What it runs |
|---|---|
| 8 GB | A compact general model, an embedding model, a reranker, a compact multimodal model |
| 12 GB | A mainstream general model, a mainstream multimodal model |
| 16 GB | A larger, efficient mixture-of-experts model |
| 24 GB, or several smaller cards in one machine | The flagship general model |
A rung is guidance. The decision is always made by admission, on your card, at the moment you ask — see models.
The NVIDIA driver#
On Linux you need a working NVIDIA driver before installing Nodeau.
nvidia-smiIf that prints a table of GPUs, you are ready.
Nodeau will never install, upgrade, replace or remove your driver, and never touches Secure Boot, the bootloader or the kernel command line. That decision affects whether your machine boots to a desktop, and it is yours. If the driver is not working, Nodeau stops and tells you rather than trying to fix it.
Disk#
| The Nodeau binaries | under 100 MB |
| Container images (Linux only) | about 3 GB |
| The starter model | about 2.6 GB |
| Recommended free space | 20 GB |
Model files are large and you will want more than one. Plan for the models you intend to run rather than for the starter.
Memory#
16 GB of system RAM or more is comfortable on Linux. Model files pass through system memory on their way to the card.
On Apple Silicon, memory is unified: the same pool serves the system, your applications and the GPU. Whether a model fits therefore depends on what else is running, and it can change between one attempt and the next. A refusal today after a success yesterday is Nodeau reading the machine correctly, not a fault — see Install on macOS.
Network#
Installation needs outbound HTTPS to reach the release, the container images and the model publisher. After that, inference needs no network at all.
Nodeau opens no inbound ports and needs no port forwarding. The local endpoint binds 127.0.0.1 and nothing else, and that is not a setting. If you connect a fleet to Nodeau Cloud, your machines reach out; nothing ever connects in. See security and privacy.
Privileges#
install.sh | Runs as you. Refuses to run as root. Calls no sudo. |
nodeau install on Linux | Needs sudo for the package and cluster steps. Every privileged command is printed in full before you are asked. |
nodeau install on macOS | Needs no password at all. Everything lives in your own Library folder. |
What each plan allows#
Limits are enforced by the binary from a signed entitlement, not by a web page.
| Home (free) | Home Pro | Business | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Machines | 1 | 3 | Unlimited |
| GPUs in any one machine | 1 | 2 | Unlimited |
| Models serving at once | 2 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Batch jobs | — | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Users | 1 | 1 | Unlimited |
Everything that protects you — admission, artifact verification, authentication, every integrity check — is identical on every plan and is never withheld. See accounts, plans and entitlements.
Documentation for the current published build, the beta channel. Something here wrong or missing? Tell us — a report from a machine we have never seen is the most useful thing we get.