[traveler1]

I have an M4 Mac Mini running the following in a VM:

- OpenWRT (previously OPNSense & once Mikrotik RouterOS) using 2x 2.5Gbps Ethernet NICs via USB-C

- OpenMediaVault (Exposing a 4-bay DAS via USB-C, 2x3TB Drives in Btrfs RAID-1)

- HassOS (Home Assistant OS)

On the host, I'm running OLlama and a reverse proxy through Docker.

The whole thing uses 7 watts of power at any given time - I've seen max peaks of 12w when running LLM queries. The drive bay actually uses more than it.

Through power saving alone, it will pay for itself in 5 years over my previous AMD Zen 2 build.

[mightysashiman]

My question was rather about MacOS guest(s) on a MacOS host. Contrarily to specialised linux distros (Home Assistant, OpenWRT...) MacOS doesn't strike me as particularly minimalistic won I wonder about the amount of overhead and plain storage requirements just running them idle...

I understand for specific MacOS or iOS development wanting template envs one would want to easily and repeatedly spawn up / destroy.

[threecheese]

Out of curiosity, why not containers for OMV and Haas? QoS? And I’m dying to know what you are using openwrt for. I’m looking at setting up a Mini as well, and have been using Colima/LIMA to run containers on Rosetta/Mac vz locally and it seems to work well enough.

[traveler1]

I assume you mean something other than OMV, ran in a container? Reason I put it in a VM was that I wanted to use a Linux compatible file system. I’m using BTRFS with raid, I’m sure I could have ran APFS in raid instead!

For haas, it was partly QoS, partly because I had historically ran all of my things separately. I might look at bringing that to the container level.

I’m using OpenWRT as my main router! One port to my LAN switch, one to the modem.

[mightysashiman]

Haas has massive limitations in its container mode. (Add-ons, OTA updates,...)

[buildbot]

I’d use a Mac Mini in a heartbeat if they had an ECC option :(

[wslh]

What is your use case where not having an ECC is critical? Assuming something related to complex calculations that cannot fail and takes a lot of time to process?