Compute (Local / Cloud)

Local / Cloud, at /compute, decides where each capability runs: transcription, speech, text, documents, images, video.

Three settings per capability

• Auto decides from what this machine has.
• Local is always here, even with no card.
• Cloud is always a provider, even on a machine that could do it, a laptop on battery is a real reason.

Read the sentence, not the badge

Every row explains what it resolved to and why, “no GPU on this machine, so it goes to a provider”. A row that only said CLOUD would teach nobody anything. The awkward cases are covered: local chosen where it cannot work, cloud chosen with no key, and neither path available (“neither path works yet”, paste a key in Settings → Secrets).

Why per capability

Erebros was written on a workstation with a graphics card, so half its engines quietly assume one. In a container that assumption is the whole problem, Whisper does not refuse without a GPU, it grinds on CPU at roughly real time and the app looks broken while nothing errors. But a missing card is a reason to move transcription, not a reason to stop running text models locally.

The blunt instrument

EREBROS_FORCE_CLOUD=1 overrides the probe entirely and sends every capability to a provider, the setting a GPU-less container wants. Put it in the service unit, not only in your shell. See Proxmox deployment.

See also

• Setup