The endpoint deployed on 2026-10-18, so the admin card must carry its state rather than a placeholder: wip becomes false (the registry schema wants the key on every service; false is what the live cards use) and the description drops the "Hidden until deployed" line. showLink stays false and the card stays admin-only: an HTTP API has no page to open, and homepage-status.py counts ANY HTTP response as up, so the card is honest with no link and no /health path in the probe. The voice seam that pinned wip == down is re-keyed to the deployed contract and now also refuses a link or a user-category placement.
PR #15 corrected the engine's page, the research brief's law bullet and the
warmer's header, but the retired ladder had six more homes: both quadlet files
("6.2-8.0 s… 0.5 ms", "~6-8 s each", "paying the 5.5 s cold decode"),
`scripts/frank-tts-engine.env` (the whole law paragraph and the WARM_TEXT note),
`scripts/frank-tts.env`, the [[Frank TTS]] troubleshooting row that told an
operator to expect ~5.5 s, the research brief's consequences paragraph, and one
test comment.
All re-keyed to what was measured on the deployed container 2026-10-18: the
first synthesis of a freshly registered voice costs 1,883 ms against 1,226-1,283
ms afterwards, so the warm pass buys about 0.6 s — and the reason it exists at
all, which the pages never led with, is that the registry is memory-only: without
the hook every voice name is a 400 until somebody synthesizes. The trial's dated
worklog entry stays as written; the correction points at it.
No behavior change: comments, unit lore and docs only, so no cfhash move and no
image rebuild.
The deploy of the newly built engine image came back `0 voice(s) warm` with
`/app/warm-voices.sh: line 152: /usr/bin/curl: Argument list too long` above
every line, and the unit was `active` with a green `/health` beside it. The hook
built `{"name":…,"wav_b64":…}` in a shell variable and passed it as ONE curl
argument; the kernel caps a single argument at MAX_ARG_STRLEN = 131,072 bytes,
and the shipped reference clips base64 to about 1.27 MB, so curl was never
executed and the hook reported the absence as "HTTP no response".
The body now goes to a mktemp file and curl reads `@file`; the audio enters
through a redirection instead of a command substitution, so the script never
holds a 1.3 MB string at all. Every pack in the fleet is ~1 MB, i.e. ~13x the
cliff, so this was always going to happen — it took the first real packs to show
it because no fixture was ever that big.
The regression test therefore ships a 300 KB pack against the seam's REAL stub
listener with the REAL curl: it fails with the same kernel error the host did
(`Argument list too long`, then the 400-for-every-name summary), and passes once
the body is a file. Proved red before the fix, green after.
build_compose_image skips `podman build` when the installed image's `cfhash`
label matches a hash taken from the checkout now — the skip is what keeps
frank-tts-engine's ten-minute recursive source clone off every re-deploy. The
hash covered the Containerfile ALONE, so any change to a file the image COPYs
was invisible: edit dankclaw/voiceservice/app.py or tts-engine-warm.sh, re-run
the deploy, and podman reports the existing image is fine. The redeployed
container runs the previous code, /health answers 200, and the e2e gate has no
way to see it. It bit the boot warmer twice this week.
Each case arm now names its own extra=(…) — the paths its Containerfile COPYs —
and the label hashes the Containerfile plus those. The two arms are kept apart
deliberately: the façade bakes app.py and tts-start.sh, the engine bakes
tts-engine-start.sh and tts-engine-warm.sh, and comfyui/loki/alloy have no extra
files, so their hash is unchanged and they do not rebuild on this commit.
Hashing rather than word-splitting because these are repo-relative paths under
a fixed checkout root.
The seam drives the real function against a stub podman and asserts observable
output — did the deploy ask podman to build, or did it skip? — in five steps:
first deploy builds, unchanged tree does not, editing the engine's COPY'd warm
hook rebuilds the ENGINE image and not the façade, editing app.py rebuilds the
façade. Reverted scripts/deploy-remote.sh to prove it red on the old hash: the
warm-hook step is exactly where it fails.
`WARM_TEXT` reaches the container **with its quotes**. The unit reads the env
file through podman's `--env-file`, which takes the literal remainder of the
line — no shell parsing — while bash `source` strips one layer. The hook
interpolated the raw value into the synthesis body, so with the quotes intact
the JSON was invalid and every voice logged "registered, but the warm synthesis
failed" while a hand-run hook (bash shape) succeeded. Reproduced both ways
against a real `podman run --env-file`, not by reading the man page.
The hook now strips exactly one matched pair — only when both ends are the same
quote AND the inner content carries another quote or a backslash, so a value
that legitimately contains quotes is never mangled — and then JSON-escapes what
is left, which is what makes a sentence like `He said "hi\" once"` arrive as
itself instead of corrupting the body.
The seam gains a test that reads `scripts/frank-tts-engine.env` BOTH ways —
`source` and the way `podman --env-file` does — and asserts the engine receives
the same sentence either way, in both shapes. A test that only sources the file
cannot see this bug, which is how it survived the first deploy.
Stage 2 of the voice stack. Repo state only: nothing deployed, no host touched,
no container started.
- `frank-tts` is now registered everywhere a dankclaw service has to be:
`SERVICE_ORDER` (after `frank-tts-engine`, before the consumers), the planner's
dankclaw set, `deploy-remote.sh`'s allowlist + dispatch + a
`deploy_frank_tts` handler, and `deploy.sh`'s dispatch regex — plus the
`build_compose_image` arm naming `dankclaw/voiceservice/Containerfile`, without
which the build silently returns 0 and the unit's `Pull=never` tag never
exists.
- The unit joins TWO networks, in order: `dankclaw_default` first (default route,
where consumers and open-notebook live), then the voice bridge. `TTS_UPSTREAM`
moves from `host.containers.internal:8880` to `http://frank-tts-engine:8880` —
the actual fix for a shape that could never work, since a bridge container
cannot reach a host-loopback bind and the engine publishes nothing at all.
- `Wants=`/`After=` on the engine, never `Requires=`: the `llama-tts-cli` rollback
backend needs no upstream, so a broken engine may delay this endpoint but must
not take its unit down.
- The handler installs the engine's quadlet pair too, because a referenced
`Network=` file the generator cannot find means no façade unit is produced at
all, and `--only frank-tts` has no other way to get it. It creates
`/home/dank/voices` as the deploy user (rootless podman would auto-create a
missing bind source root-owned, which reads as "no voices"), and gates on
podman's recorded health.
- Voice naming is now written down where it can be found: a voice is a lowercase
directory name matching `^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9._-]*$`, at most 64 chars. That shape
is the intersection of two rules that disagree — the shim would accept mixed
case, the engine lowercases names — so a mixed-case pack resolves on one side
only, and the boot warmer refuses it loudly. `narrator1/2/3` are load-bearing
for open-notebook.
- Homepage card for the pair, `wip: down` and hidden, probing `127.0.0.1:7772`;
the engine gets no card because it publishes nothing and could never be probed.
- **No Prometheus job, deliberately.** No `/metrics` exists on the shim, this
Prometheus 3 refuses HTML/JSON bodies (the existing `comfyui` and `services`
probes are documented down for exactly that), and `LlmEndpointDown` is scoped
`up{job=~"frank-.*"}` — so a `/health` job would page on Signal for a healthy
endpoint. Recorded in the page instead of quietly skipped.
- Vault: new [[Frank TTS]] page linked from the index; [[Frank TTS Engine]] now
points at it for the pair's public signal; log entry for the day.
- Seam grows to 25 tests: the generator's rendering of the pair (both
attachments, first-network order, one publish, Wants-not-Requires, bounded
per-unit blocks), the env file's upstream checked as a network JOIN rather than
a string, planner separation and order, the handler's steps, the card's gating,
routing that selects both seams for either deployable.
Repo state only: nothing deployed, no host touched, no container started.
- `frank-tts-engine` on Dankclaw: `qwentts.cpp` commit
5916bf7c79dbb4e66fc059cdc507a79a23a28bb4, resident `tts-server`, 1.7 B base
talker Q4_K_M + Q8_0 tokenizer, container port 8880. It is deliberately NOT a
fleet endpoint — `frank-tts` on 7772 is the endpoint consumers address.
- Publishes NOTHING. A host-loopback publish would have been useless to the
façade (netavark DNATs published ports only, so a bridge container cannot
reach a host loopback bind — the shape that 502'd hermes) and would have been
the one LAN-reachable surface of an unauthenticated synthesiser. Both voice
containers sit on one committed quadlet network, `frank-tts-engine.network`
pinned to 10.89.5.0/24 (next free /24 after open-notebook's 10.89.4.0/24), and
peers address the engine by container name. Diagnostics and the deployer's
health gate run inside the netns (`podman exec`, `wait_container_healthy`).
- Cold-voice law honoured in the unit: the first request for a registered voice
decodes its whole reference to snapshot codec state (6.2-8.0 s, first audio
byte 5 530 ms), later ones restore in 0.5 ms, and the registry is memory-only.
`ExecStartPost=-/usr/bin/podman exec frank-tts-engine /app/warm-voices.sh`
with `TimeoutStartSec=900`; the `-` prefix keeps a failed warm from
crash-looping the endpoint under `Restart=always`. It logs cold=/warm= per
voice, so the under-a-second second request is proven on every boot.
- Thread law recorded: `tts-server` has no `--threads`; src/backend.h uses
hardware_concurrency()/2, so a cpuset pin silently changes the thread count.
- Image builds from the pinned commit with the proven line (GGML_BLAS=OFF
forced by this host, every GPU backend off, -j 8, no -DGGML_NATIVE because
ggml defaults to -march=native for the building host). Two stages; the runtime
stage COPYs both the entrypoint and the warmer, because a container that
publishes nothing is reached with `podman exec`, not a port.
- `scripts/download-frank-tts-engine-qwentts.sh` fetches the two GGUFs with byte
and LFS-oid checks (talker 1 219 245 248 B, tokenizer 291 150 624 B); the
deployer gates on --verify-only instead of pulling 1.4 GiB mid-deploy.
- Registered in SERVICE_ORDER, DANKCLAW_SERVICES, the deploy-remote.sh dispatch,
its pre-deploy requirement, deploy.sh's regex, the planner's path map (the
whole `dankclaw/voiceservice/` tree mapped to nothing before this), and
test-changed.sh ABOVE the `dankclaw/*.container` case whose `*` crosses `/`.
- New seam tests/frank_tts_engine.bats (19): the Quadlet generator's own output
for network/publish/boot/warm shape, entrypoint argv driven from the tracked
env file, the warmer against a stub tts-server over a real socket
(registration keys, ref_text absent, late engine, hung synthesis, name
refusal), the fetcher's verifier, the pinned cmake line, and both routing
tables. Suite: 422 passed.
- Vault: [[Frank TTS Engine]] linked from the index; log.md entry for the day.
scripts/voice-packs.env carries the decisions worth a diff and nothing
else: the pack list, each voice's source file, crop offset, crop length
and pinned source digest, the extractor path with its engine repo and
commit, and the artifact arithmetic. Paths and numbers only — the pack
directories themselves stay host state under /home/dank/voices.
tests/voice_pack_unit.bats pins behaviour, from inputs to observable
output: a crop inside the first ten seconds exits nonzero naming the
invariant and creates nothing, a legal one builds the whole pack, the
reference comes out 24 kHz mono inside 18-25 s (ffprobe, on a locally
generated tone), the manifest round-trips through jq with offsets and a
sha256 that matches the source bytes, a re-run without --force leaves
every byte untouched, --force retires rather than deletes, --dry-run
needs no extractor at all, and a stub extractor that changed its artifact
size cannot publish a voice. No engine binary, no GPU, no network, no
fleet host: qwen-codec is stood in by a stub with the real tool's I/O
shape, the way frank_tts_unit.bats drives its backends.
test-changed.sh routes both new paths to that seam instead of letting
them land on the generic scripts/* syntax fallback.
The env file first landed with ESPERANTO_TTS_TIMEOUT equal to SHIM_TIMEOUT=600.
Equality is a race: both budgets expire at the same instant, so the case the
number existed to prevent — the worker abandoning a synthesis frank-tts is still
finishing — is exactly what happens on the tail of a long line. Nested budgets
go inside-out, which is the rule scripts/frank-tts.env states for its own
LLAMA_TIMEOUT; the client waits one round-trip longer than the server, so a
frank-tts give-up arrives labelled as frank-tts's error. 660.
The seam's assertion moves from equality to `>` for the same reason, and now
also holds ESPERANTO_LLM_TIMEOUT under upstream's 600 s web-UI patience — above
it the failure surfaces as a UI timeout with no name on it. The scriptwriting
number itself stays at the app's 180 s default: frank-zealot answers an outline
or a transcript well inside it, which corrects the earlier commit message's
claim that both timeouts were raised past upstream's 300 s.
Structure only: what the units declare and how the scripts route them, never how
the app behaves inside a container. 19 tests.
The ones carrying real weight: the app unit has no publishable 8000 anywhere and
the database unit publishes nothing at all; the API remap off host 5055 is only
correct if API_URL names the same host port, so the seam parses the PublishPort
and compares; each unit reads the repo tunable file before the host secret file,
because podman's last-match-wins makes the order load-bearing; both health
probes are argument-only (a shell string there is a unit that starts dead); the
database password appears only as an env reference, never in Exec=; and the
episode host bind appears exactly once, since a second mount would silently
shadow the first.
The deployer assertions read the functions themselves: the gate URL path is
/health on the remapped port and must not name 5055, and the seed function
contains the blank-secret refusal plus the no-clobber test. No test asserts a
made-up endpoint or a cloud URL, and nothing touches the network.
Phase 1 of the voice-over goal (Gitea issue #2). One stdlib-only HTTP facade in
front of whichever TTS engine wins the engine decision: POST /v1/audio/speech
with voice=<name> answers audio in THAT voice, where a name is real exactly when
/voices/<name>/reference.wav exists — an unknown name is a 400 listing the
voices that are, never a silent fallback (a wrong-voice endpoint stays wrong for
weeks). voice_id works as the alias the omp harness sends; response_format=mp3
is really mp3 (ffmpeg re-encode); oversized input is refused with 414 instead of
half-narrated; /health reports the backend and the resolved voice list.
Two backends behind the one surface, chosen by TTS_BACKEND: omni-http forwards to
an OpenAI-shaped upstream carrying the voice as base64 reference_audio, and
llama-tts-cli runs a local binary per request with --tts-speaker-file at nice 19
so narration never starves the text endpoints. Both are driven in the seam
through stubs — no GPU, no containers.
Named frank-tts, a first-class fleet model endpoint: port 7772 in the 7770/7771
family, alias naming per the StarCraft law, rootless boot-persistent self-healing
quadlet with a read-only /home/dank/voices mount. Voice-pack law recorded in the
env header: reference.wav PLUS the engine's own speaker artifact (required, so a
voice is reusable in other runtimes), plus manifest.json provenance with offsets
always past the first 10 s of the source file.
Not deployed: the engine decision, the pack builder, deployer/homepage/Prometheus
registration and the omp models.yml runner row are phase 2.
Swap the 3090 endpoint from Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B PQ2_0 (2 x 200,704,
fork build 10754) to Ternary-Bonsai-2-9B PQ2_0 with the MTP head IN the
file, three conversations at the trained 262,144 window
(--ctx-size 786432 --parallel 3), on vendor fork build 10777 -- the
minimum build that pairs MTP with a quantized V cache. q8_0 K + q8_0 V
is the only KV that fits: 13,056 MiB against a 26,112 MiB f16 pair.
Settled boot 17,876 used / 6,249 free.
MTP is armed and then DECLINED by measurement: the draft context bills
its own f16 KV over the whole pool (3,072 MiB) and at UBATCH_SIZE=2048
that halves decode (167.2 -> 109.2 t/s). The documented MTP arm
(SPEC_TYPE=draft-mtp + UBATCH_SIZE=1024, 213.5 t/s) is recorded in the
env header rather than left to rediscovery.
Two bugs the trial caught: ${SPEC_PRESENCE_PENALTY:=0.0} was a
default-assignment, so the env value always won and the no-presence-penalty
MTP arm was unreachable (now ${VAR=0.0}); and the Q8_0 mmproj is the
publisher's requirement for concurrent image requests, which matters at
--parallel 3.
contextWindow is now 262144 -- the widest in the fleet -- so :7771 is the
compaction hub. 27B runbook re-banned RETIRED with its bench-window
section closed; indexes, homepage card, OpenWebUI doc and the worklog
re-keyed.
frank-dragoon's total in-flight context was HALF frank-zealot's: zealot runs
one 401,408-position pool split into two 200,704 conversations, while dragoon
ran ONE 200,704-position pool behind its two slots, so a single maximum-length
request filled it and two long conversations had to stay under ~100k each.
HALOGEN_KV_POOL_POSITIONS 200704 -> 401408 = slots x ctx, the top of the seam's
legal band (ctx <= pool <= slots * ctx). The PER-REQUEST ceiling does not move:
HALOGEN_CTX stays 200704, because the checkpoint's native window is 262,144 and
the engine's own 400 text refuses to exceed it without HALOGEN_ROPE_YARN. What
this buys is concurrency, not a longer conversation, which is why the harness
contextWindow (155648 = ceiling - 45056) is untouched.
Cost: ~10.8 GiB of KV where 200,704 cost 5.5 (262,144 cost 7.2; the
2026-10-06 shape's 524,288 measured 14.6), taken from the page cache the 51.2 GB
n-gram table reads through — the warm prompt-cache ratio is the number to
re-measure after the boot. Engine-side total goes 74.1 -> ~79.4 GiB of 121.2.
Also carries scripts/download-frank-zealot-bonsai2-ptq1.sh: the PTQ1_0 candidate
payload fetcher (5,946,648,928 B, LFS sha256-verified, mmproj hardlinked), with
the publisher's own throughput table in its header — the packing is smaller but
the card measures it SLOWER on Ampere, so the swap is decided on our card, not
on the card's A100 row.
The scrape has never worked: lastError is "server returned HTTP status 501 Not
Implemented" on http://host.containers.internal:7771/metrics, and the oldest
retained sample of up{job="frank-zealot"} (2026-10-11) is already 0 -- the target
has been red across four payload generations while /health answered 200 the whole
time, keeping the critical LlmEndpointDown alert permanently active. llama.cpp
gates /metrics behind --metrics; halogen serves it natively, which is why the
asymmetry looked like a 3090-only problem.
METRICS=1 in the shipped env, --metrics reaches the argv through EXTRA_ARGS, and
the seam asserts both directions (default ships the flag, METRICS=0 strips it).
Diagnosed via /api/v1/targets lastError rather than the alert list, which is also
the lesson: Alertmanager here has no persistence, so a reboot re-stamps startsAt
and a weeks-old fault looks fresh.
The full-suite re-run after the reset fix came back "1 flaky": 12-crawl reached
plex.franksdank.cloud, the guard cleared, and Plex Web — signed out in the
qa-e2e profile — handed the browser to its own hosted sign-in surface, so the
hostname never settled on the vhost (60 s poll, Expected plex.franksdank.cloud /
Received app.plex.tv). settleThroughGuard now takes a HANDOFFS landing list per
vhost; only plex.franksdank.cloud gets one, every other host still has to land on
its own vhost, and the guard assertions (Anubis cleared, no authentik uidField,
status < 500) are unchanged. Worklog and E2E gotcha 6 carry both symptoms: the
ERR_ABORTED reset and the hand-off.
Two faces of the same verification round.
12-crawl returned to the homepage between links with a bare page.goto, and Plex
Web (signed out, so it renders its own sign-in iframe for its Plex-account flow)
keeps redirecting the top frame: Chromium cancelled our goto with
net::ERR_ABORTED, outside the try, so the whole crawl died — once as a 420 s
timeout in the deploy gate, once at 5.4 s on the same link. backHome() tolerates
that one error class and re-issues; any other error still propagates, and the
per-app verdict (guard settled, hostname, no authentik uidField, status < 500)
is unchanged. Plex was healthy throughout (container up 2 days, 32400 answering
HTTPS 401 / plain-HTTP empty reply), so this was app behaviour, not a fault —
recorded as gotcha 6 on the E2E page.
The 200,704 boot printed 5.5 GiB reserved and 74.1 GiB in all (not the ~5.4/~74
my arithmetic predicted), so every prose figure is re-keyed to the ledger, and
the runbook gains the second production-boot section: marker revision, pool
reservation, shape line, prompt-cache entry size, and the refusal contract at the
new ceiling (400 in 0.86 s naming 200704 and the 96,405-token overage, before any
prefill). Cost stated (two maximum-length conversations never coexist; the 180k
compaction target is unreachable inside a 155,648 window) and purchase stated
(1.7 GiB of page cache, 9.1 GiB against the 2026-10-06 shape).
Frank's call the same evening as the native-payload cutover: HALOGEN_CTX and
HALOGEN_KV_POOL_POSITIONS both 262144 -> 200704 (a multiple of 4096, the rung
frank-zealot already runs). The checkpoint's native window is 262,144 and the
engine serves anything below it, so this is a RAM decision, not a capability
limit: the KV reservation drops 7.2 GiB -> ~5.4 (the 2026-10-06 pool measured
14.6), and by the FLAGS.md law -- RAM the pool takes is RAM that n-gram table
loses -- the freed positions become page cache for the 47.68 GiB table that
long prompts read. Engine-side total ~74 GiB instead of 75.8.
The 400-zone law is invariant to the value, so the harness moves WITH the
ceiling: models.yml contextWindow 217088 -> 155648 = ceiling - 45056, keeping
the gap that absorbs the chars/4 under-count (worst-case request ~156.2k vs
the 200,704 ceiling, ~44k margin). Compaction now fires at 85% = 132,300 est
(~136k measured); the 180k target of the 262,144 era is unreachable because
the window itself is 155,648. maxTokens 45056 and the coupled
cap/timeout 65536/7200 are untouched.
Cost stated plainly: with pool == ctx, ONE maximum-length request fills the
pool, so two long conversations never coexist (two of <=100k do). Acceptable
because frank-dragoon carries only the slow role and the security-reviewer
subagent, not the interactive workhorse.
Seam re-keyed: the fit-law test now proves the invariant at the new pair, and
the pool law (ctx <= pool <= slots * ctx) still holds with pool == ctx.
Quat3rnion/halogen-qwen3.8-flash-next-v2-abliterated is now the NATIVE
2026-10-11 v2 conversion of orcarouter's pinned BF16 (66,687,678,432 B,
LFS sha256 b5bd925f...) — 32 bytes smaller than the writer transplant it
used to ship under the same filename. The n-gram table, vision tower and
tokenizer are the stock peonist companions, hardlinked out of the swift15
payload dir: the release publishes only the main file and no source-matched
pair exists, so the engine's own tools are the referee (niah 18/18, ppl
3.968 with mean KL 0.155 against the swift15 logits, 2026-10-17).
Memory saving, per the card: HALOGEN_KV_POOL_POSITIONS 524288 -> 262144,
one pool behind both slots (boot ledger: 7.2 GiB, where the old pool
measured 14.6). HALOGEN_CTX stays 262144 so the per-request ceiling and the
harness contract (contextWindow 217088) do not move; only two MAXIMUM-length
conversations lose the ability to coexist.
Measured against the swift15 boot on identical traffic: cold prefill
+12.6 %, decode 50.0 vs 46.8 t/s, NIAH 18/18 vs 17/18, PPL +2.3 %, thinking
tokens x1.9 (the finetune's reasoning compression is gone), refusals 0/5 on
both.
- card/docs: prism-ml payload link, PQ2_0 spec, ~77 t/s (measured single
stream, replacing the 9B's ~95)
- warning re-keyed: zealot is no longer an uncensored endpoint, so the card
carries the base-alignment notice and points uncensored work at dragoon;
the test's "common uncensored text" equality (zealot==dragoon) is retired
with the payload it described — dragoon alone carries the legal warning
- env: Bonsai2 payload pair, CACHE_TYPE_K/V=q8_0 (f16 OOMs at 2x200,704:
34 KiB vs 64 KiB/token over the 16 full-attention layers), measured boot
ledger 22,664 used / 1,461 free incl. the 873 MiB mmproj that lands AFTER
the engine fit check, q4_0 fallback rung, CRACK one-line MODEL_FILE swap
- deployer: runtime/model/mmproj gates re-keyed to the PrismML vendor build
(the only loader for GGML tensor type 142 + prism.hadamard.* metadata)
- seam: payload trio pinned; KV argv assertions now derived from CACHE_TYPE_*
in the env file — the wrong-var-name f16 fallback that produced the first
failed trial window can no longer pass silently
Model swap on the radiance endpoint: MODEL_FILE moves from the in-house
qwen4exp-swift15-w4dn8-i8-hc8m.rad (116,416 MiB) to the engine author's
published qwen3.8-next-flash-fp8-iq4r-moe.rad (116,322 MiB, official
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next bf16 -> 4-bit non-uniform codebook experts + int8
trunk, card KL 0.0789 / top-1 92.85 % vs bf16). NO argument changed:
25600/5120 vram pair, 44928 host pool, fp8 KV, 3 x 200000, MTP depth 2,
wht6, MNBT 2048, froggeric v22.5 — the 2026-10-13 shape carries verbatim.
New fetch script scripts/download-frank-archon-iq4r.sh (hfget + exact
byte count 121,969,901,568 + LFS sha256, --verify-only default, ungated,
no token on the command line). Unit/serve/deployer lore re-keyed; the
seam pins the new payload id + sha256 and keeps the w4dn8 rollback
provenance. Homepage card points at the publisher repo.
Rollback: revert this commit (w4dn8 .rad stays on disk). The fp8-native
rad was deleted from dankserver 2026-10-15 (Frank's one-time rm, volume
for this payload); rebuild path documented.
The 2 GiB/card that \`rocm-smi\` shows free is not idle: the engine's budget
table calls it driver context + the 896 MiB activation arena + 96 MiB headroom,
and says the rest is `throughput on the floor`. Its own settle line is the
number that matters — `card 0 settled at 2.01 GiB free against 209.19 MiB (the
96.00 MiB --gpu-headroom-mib and 113.19 MiB kept for the static region)` — so
1,849 MiB above the ENGINE's floor is claimable and the real ceiling is 30,969
MiB, not the 29,120 my 1 GiB reserve invented on 2026-10-11.
Shipped pair 25600/5120 = 30,720: +1,600 MiB of slab, ~458 MiB above the floor.
The slab is already saturated at 24,000 (mover took all of it, 451 KiB slack),
so this is the only direction left — KV is at its 3-slot floor (5,063 needed of
5,120).
Named prediction, because today's two points say the slab is a THRESHOLD and not
a slope (22,208 -> 3,397 t/s, 24,000 -> 3,290 t/s at 43.5k single-stream): this
arm buys ~1,600 resident expert slots and ~0 prefill. The point that moves
prefill is 26,071 (2026-10-11: 4,379 t/s), fundable only at two slots. Prefill
moving > +-3 % here falsifies the threshold reading.
Seam: the ceiling gate now derives from the engine's budget table (30,969) and
is the single owner of the pair arithmetic; the duplicate I put in the shape
test is removed.
Frank's call: three slots, and spend the KV the third slot doesn't need on
resident experts. `--max-num-seqs 3`, `--vram-kv-mib 6912 -> 5120`,
`--vram-weights-mib 22208 -> 24000` — the pair is still exactly the measured
29,120 MiB/card ceiling. The pool funds 608,027 tokens against the 600,000-token
contract (3 x 200,000, +1.3 %), and the slab gains 8.1 %.
The direction is the 2026-10-11 A/B: prefill is slab-limited, KV beyond the
contract buys nothing. At fp8 the slab curve measured on this host is
22,208 -> 3,397 t/s and 26,071 -> 4,379 t/s at 43.5k, i.e. ~0.25 t/s per MiB, so
24,000 predicts ~3,850 t/s single-stream. Falsifiable; the probe is the check.
The cost is named, not hidden: a FOURTH full-height conversation no longer fits
(4 x 200,000 needs 6,601 MiB of pool) and is refused as too large to ever fit —
radiance never truncates. Reverting to four slots is one env pair.
Seam: two new arithmetic gates, because both failures are boot-then-400 shape
faults that no flag check catches — the pair must respect the per-card ceiling,
and the pool must back seqs x max-model-len at the dtype's measured rate plus
the dtype-independent terms (110 MiB a sequence of recurrent state, 448 MiB of
prefix checkpoints).
a9da65e put the raise inside the serve script, which runs as `User=dank`: the
knob is root-owned 0644, so `-w` is false and the write silently failed — the
gate printed its refusal on a cap it had just failed to move. The privileged
path is systemd's `+` prefix: `ExecStartPre=+scripts/ttm-preflight.sh --raise`
runs as root even under `User=`, before ExecStart, so `Restart=always` can
never outrun it. The lib is now also executable (`--raise` sources the env file
and verifies), and keeps a `sudo -n` fallback for a human running the gate from
a shell.
Seam: the refusal cases run with a PATH that has `cat`+`bash` and NO `sudo`
(root writes a 444 file, so a passwordless dev box would have tested nothing),
and both now assert the gate's own exit 1, not merely non-zero. New seam covers
the unit line and the `--raise` entry point end to end (writable knob -> raised,
no args -> usage exit 2).
The 2026-10-12 23:17 power failure reset /sys/module/ttm/parameters/pages_limit
from the manual 2026-10-05 raise (200 GiB) back to the kernel default (half of
RAM = 125,988 MiB), below the pinned-RAM ledger floor of 150,000 MiB. The serve
script's preflight named the refusal and exited 1; Restart=always re-ran it
6,919 times over ~20 hours and frank-archon served nobody.
scripts/ttm-preflight.sh (sourced by the serve script) now RAISES the knob
itself before refusing: the unit is root, the knob is a 0644 root module
parameter, and the cap is a runtime knob whose default is half of RAM — so a
manual sysfs write is not a repair procedure, it is a countdown to the next
reboot. FRANK_ARCHON_TTM_TARGET_MIB=204800 records the host ceiling; the gate
re-reads the cap after writing and only then refuses, so a knob the kernel
will not move is still a named failure.
Shape change (Frank's call): FOUR decode slots x 200,000 tokens with fp8
(quantized) KV. The pool must back seqs x max-model-len, so fp8 is what funds
the fourth slot: at bf16 the four slots cost 11,679 MiB of pool and would cut
the resident expert slab to 17,441 MiB (-33 %); at fp8 they cost 6,601 MiB, so
the pool stays 6,912 MiB (predicts 843,566 tokens), the VRAM pair stays at the
measured 29,120 MiB/card ceiling, the weights slab and the 44 GiB host pool are
untouched, and the fused TP all-reduce rides 4 x (1+2) = 12 rows, inside the
25-row bound where the wht6 wire is bit-exact.
Runbook section `2026-10-11 — unquantized KV at 2 x 200,000`: the dtype law
(only bf16|fp8, no K/V split; the QSA block key is dtype-fixed, which is why
bf16 costs 1.89x and not 2x), the pool formula that reproduces both live
boots within 0.1%, the seqs-3-to-2 provenance (the tcclaviger fork's
torch.compile constraint, not radiance's), the boot ledger, and the A/B.
The A/B, fp8 control arm through a transient FRANK_ARCHON_ENV_FILE drop-in:
prefill -29% (4,379 -> 3,126 cold), TTFT at the full window +25% (the 2 x 197k
pair: 110.5 s -> 138.1 s), decode inside the +-3% band on two of three passes,
draft acceptance UP 0.661 -> 0.740. The price is prefill, not decode. Open
call for Frank: keep exact KV, or take the cheap fp8 2 x 200k fit (pool 3,648).
Also corrects two stale index entries (w4dn8 said STAGED, fp8-native said
ACTIVE), adds the worklog entry, and commits the verification tool as
scripts/probe-frank-archon-kv.py — it carries the probe law that cost two
false negatives: radiance answers in reasoning_content, so a chat probe with a
small budget reads as empty content + finish_reason stop on a healthy server.
Tests 368/368.
The KV pool at the fp8 shape backed 386,904 tokens — 1.93 sessions of the
served 200,000 window, so a second full-height conversation preempted to the
host/disk prefix tiers. Moving the cache to bf16 (the engine's only
unquantized rung; `--kv-cache-dtype` takes bf16|fp8 and has no per-tensor
K/V split) doubles what a token costs: 7.3125 -> 14.625 KiB per rank
(kv_attn 26.00 -> 52.00 KiB per 4-token page + kv_qsa_bkey 3.25 -> 6.50).
Pool 3543 -> 6912 MiB (437k tokens, >= 2 x 200,000), and the weights slab
pays for all of it: 26071 -> 22208 MiB, the pair pinned to the measured
card ceiling 29,120 MiB (card 31,856 - 1,710 consumed outside both budgets
- 1,024 free). The resident set that leaves VRAM spills into the pinned host
pool, so 40960 -> 44928 MiB, and the prefix host tier doubles with the entry
size (58.50 -> 117 KiB): 4096 -> 8192 MiB. Pinned ledger ~147 GiB, ttm floor
140000 -> 150000 (cap 200 GiB).
--max-num-seqs 3 -> 2: two slots x the window is the capacity contract, and
the "seqs 2 cannot boot" law is the retired tcclaviger fork's torch.compile
query_start_loc constraint, not radiance's (radiance booted seqs 2 in the
fp8-native era; the 2026-10-06 sweep had 2 and 3 tied inside +-3%). Bonus:
the fused all-reduce is now declared over 2 x 3 = 6 rows, under the 25-row
bound at which the wht6 wire is bit-exact.
Cost, paid twice on this engine: idle KV VRAM is also the expert cache's
spillover (lends 2.69 GiB + 740 MiB of arena), so the pool steals weight
residency from the slab AND the lendable cache. Priors: 2.14 GiB of stolen
weights cost 2.5% decode (MAX_MODEL_LEN 262144), the EVC ladder's other
direction cost 8.9%. Prediction -3..-8% vs the fp8 control (136 t/s at 44.5k,
acceptance 0.7246); the deploy boot ledger and live probes are the referee.
Seams: MAX_SEQS/HOST_POOL/KV_DTYPE/PREFIX_HOST literals follow the shape, and
two new invariants guard it — the KV pool must back seqs x max-model-len at
the declared dtype (an engine hard limit: an over-long request is accepted
then refused as too large to ever fit; the formula reproduces the fp8 boot's
386,904 to within 0.1%), and the VRAM pair must stay inside the ceiling.
The 2026-10-09 wire aliases become the service names everywhere:
systemd units, serve scripts, env files and FRANK_* variables,
deploy-plan/deploy-remote service keys, container names, Prometheus
job names + alert rules, Grafana dashboard queries, bats seams,
runbook filenames, homepage/AGENTS lore, and historical prose.
Rollback tags renamed in lockstep. Residue in the tree: zero.
Retired frank-medium/small/npu names are history and stay.
Known casualty: scripts/patches/*.patch context lines were rewritten;
those retired-era vLLM-fork patches no longer apply byte-exact.
The 2026-10-08 rename moved the harness model ids and the homepage cards;
the served aliases on the wire stayed frank-primary/frank-large/
frank-secondary. This closes the gap: the alias each endpoint announces is
now the family name, while the services, units, scripts, env files and
runbooks keep the old names (container identity stays stable).
- scripts/frank-secondary.env ALIAS, scripts/frank-large.env
HALOGEN_MODEL_ID, scripts/frank-primary.env FRANK_PRIMARY_SERVED_NAME
(+ the two serve-script defaults/gate messages)
- seams re-pinned: frank_secondary/frank_large/frank_primary unit bats
- fleet harnesses retargeted: bench-probe, deep-probe, calib-push,
fleet-probes-swift15, autoresearch(+measure), bench-threads-batch-http,
bench-decode
- shared/homepage/docs.html: api-id annotations and the "switchover will
rename the ids" footnote removed — the page's names are now the ids;
opencode/Pi/curl examples send frank-zealot
- dankclaw/hermes/config.yaml.example: frank-large -> frank-dragoon and the
live 262144 context (Hermes routes by served id; see Hermes.md)
Consumers with live state re-keyed out-of-band in the same window:
OpenWebUI (model row, access_grant, openai.api_configs model_ids) and the
Hermes config.yaml.
- Icons: Copyparty -> improvised amber folder, Marreta -> crumbling
wall (bricks + red crack), Calibre-Web -> book, OpenWebUI -> official
logo.png from openwebui.com, Seerr -> official seerr.dev
os_logo_filled.svg.
- Tiles with an open link are clickable whole (.panel.clickable: hover
lift + glow; inner link clicks pass through).
- Any DOWN panel (app tile or model card) gets a red gradient wash and a
slow pulsing glow (.panel.down, .mi-card:has(.badge.down)).
- docs / admin / account-settings buttons moved from the footer to the
header (nav.top-links); footer keeps the deployment stamp.
- Zealot compaction advice promoted from the Use paragraph to a bordered
glowing model.compaction callout (.mi-comp); component seam pinned to
the new field.
- Every app card carries hex-clipped art: 19 amber-tinted brand marks
from the Simple Icons CDN plus 19 improvised monogram SVGs, wired via
a per-service "art" field; homepage_config.bats pins art presence for
all 32 apps.
- Model cards render zealot -> dragoon -> archon (registry order pinned
in the seam).
- Dragoon and zealot share one common uncensored legal warning (adult
content, harmful/hateful/illegal descriptions, sensitive offensive
cybersecurity topics, severe legal risk, "don't ruin this server for
everybody"), hover label on card and docs.
- Archon gets a bordered red permission callout: ask Frank before use.
- SearXNG obfuscation-not-anonymity note moved to a card-level hover
warning (.svc-warn) and a docs hover note.
- Gitea: self-service signup flow; no need to ask Frank.
- Footer docs/admin/account-settings become glowing bordered buttons;
the admin button is shown only to homepage-admins members via a new
Caddy /whoami endpoint echoing the outpost-injected X-Authentik-*
headers (spoof-proof; the /admin* 403 stays the real gate). e2e pins
both sides.
- Docs naming swept: Protoss names primary, bracketed api ids, explicit
note that a future switchover renames the ids themselves.
The Protoss model cards render as .mi-name inside one full-width panel;
the panel-name census now counts both render styles, keeping services.json
the single source of truth.
The model cards become the StarCraft trio: frank-large -> frank-dragoon,
frank-primary -> frank-archon, frank-secondary -> frank-zealot (family
names only; endpoint/API ids unchanged). The three cards fuse into one
Model Information component: per-unit Protoss accent colours and hex-
clipped unit art, 15px type, clickable StarCraft unit-voice quotations
(original .ogg files from the fandom wiki, served from /sfx/), supervision
notes (dragoon/archon safe for autonomous use, zealot tight supervision),
compaction-model recommendation for frank-zealot, and uncensored-model
legal notes rendered as hover tooltips instead of wall text. docs.html
carries the same renames plus api-id mapping.
App-card updates: Seerr, Calibre-Web, RomM, Jellyfin set to WIP: DOWN
with Open links removed (new wip "down" badge state); Copyparty notes it
serves all other media apps content including WIP apps; Gitea and Plex
noted as needing logins separate from SSO; SearXNG noted as obfuscated,
not anonymous (upstream API keys tie to Frank).
Plumbing: Caddy @data allowlist grew /sfx/*; deploy_homepage copies sfx/;
homepage_config.bats pins the new probe names, the component fields,
art/voice-file presence, and the wip-down schema.
Every fleet model card (and the #models docs section) now states, in
plain family-facing terms, what the model is equivalent to:
frank-large ~ Claude Sonnet 5 / OpenAI-Luna, frank-primary ~ Claude
Opus 4.8 / OpenAI-Terra (both Summer 2026 frontier), frank-secondary ~
last year (2025) frontier. Rendered as a new details.equiv line
(desc-equiv, styled in the head color, bare-mode clean); pinned in
homepage_config.bats.
The harness clamps max_tokens to min(45056, contextWindow - est - 4096),
its chars/4 est under-counts the rendered prompt by ~3 % (measured:
152,938 -> 157,388 and 158,906 -> 165,301), and compaction fires only at
85 % -- so with window == engine ceiling 200192, every request in the
est ~146k-184k zone was a guaranteed 400. HALOGEN_CTX=262144 (native) +
KV pool 524288; harness window 217088 = ceiling - 45k absorbs the
estimate error (worst-case request ~219k <= 262144). models.yml updated
out-of-repo: contextWindow 217088, maxTokens 45056.
The @data path allowlist on the post-auth listener did not include /img/*,
so docs screenshots fell through to the index.html catch-all and the
browser got 200 text/html for every PNG (docs images broken live
2026-10-08). Pinned by the homepage_caddy seam.
Capacity trade: the 9B dense-hybrid (qwen35: 32 layers = 8 full-attention
+ 24 Gated DeltaNet, 4 KV heads x 256 dim, native 262,144, MTP-less,
natively multimodal) costs ~7 GiB of weights where the 26B MoE cost
~16.6 GiB. The freed room buys back the second conversation slot and
exact KV: --ctx-size 401408 --parallel 2 (two 200,704 windows), f16 K +
f16 V, MTP off (the file carries no nextn/mtp tensors - flag-only enable
is impossible), vision via the publisher's BF16 mmproj, ubatch 1024
(the CUDA decode-optimal value), verbosity 4, publisher sampler recipe
(0.6/0.95/20/0) in models.yml.
Hosts with the MiMo-V2.6-Distill Q6_K boots at this geometry: 21,276 MiB
used / 2,849 free at ubatch 1024, 40,960 tokens of fp16 KV at ubatch
2048. Compaction stays routed here; window math is unchanged (maxTokens
16,384 keeps the worst-case harness request inside the slot).
Gemma4 payload (Q4_K_M + mmproj + MTP assistant) stays on disk as the
rollback; its runbook is retired in place, keeping the attention_k_eq_v
pair-billing law.
Co-Authored-By: omp <omp@franksdank.cloud>
Payload: HauhauCS/Gemma4-26B-A4B-QAT-Uncensored Q4_K_M (16,796,015,520 B)
+ the publisher's BF16 mmproj, /home/dank/models/Gemma4-26B-A4B/.
Shape: ONE 200,704-token slot (--parallel 1; 2x200,704 does not fit the
24 GiB card), f16 K + q8_0 V under flash attention, batch 4096 / ubatch
1024, --log-verbosity 4, MTP OFF (the gemma4-assistant file is on disk,
not loaded: its draft KV is built against the target's full window,
measured +1.9 GiB -> 23,806/319 free, no margin beside the f16-K raise).
Measured boots (nvidia-smi): q8_0 K + q8_0 V / ubatch 2048 / MTP off =
21,890 used / 2,235 free; with the MTP assistant = 23,806 / 319.
Engine facts recorded: gemma4 hybrid attention (25 sliding-window + 5
full-attention layers) so KV scales with 5 layers only, and
attention_k_eq_v is honoured by build 5fc4f3c (pool bills K-only; the
measured q8_0 pool = 2.05 GiB = the K-only figure).
Serve script gained VERBOSITY (+ --log-verbosity in the argv), the
SPEC_DRAFT_FILE drafter path, and defaults/lore retargeted to Gemma4.
deploy-remote.sh payload gates follow the env. The frank-secondary bats
seam is rewritten for the new contract (argv-based) and fixes a
pre-existing vacuity: serve_argv regenerates the test env, so
mutations made before it were silently undone - tests that mutate now
exec through run_stage. frank-secondary is the fleet compaction hub
(200,704 is the only window that fits a worst-case compaction input).
Engine v1.2.0 (Codeberg e95d397, Docker Hub tag 1.2.0, index digest
665775ed...) removes --expert-vs-cache-ratio. The explicit
--vram-weights-mib 26071 / --vram-kv-mib 3543 pair transcribes the live
1.0.13 boot ledger at ratio 0.82 (weights 25.46 GiB, KV 3.46 GiB per
card); bracket arms scale KV linearly in (1-r): 0.90 -> 1968, 0.95 -> 984.
Serve script, autoresearch harness, and bats gates follow; the bats
shape asserts are realigned to the deployed seqs=3/spec=2 sweep result
(95923d3, df6b5bb) they failed to track.
Frank's order the same night. The 1024->2048 rung measured +4.6 %
prefill for 616 MiB on the 3090 (2026-10-05 boot pair); the 112k cut
left 1,751 MiB free, so it rides with ~1.1 GiB predicted margin.
Decode is ubatch-invariant; batch 4096 >= 2048 keeps the seam happy.
Cross-cutting rename of the current llama.cpp endpoint on the RTX 3090
(port 7771) from frank-small to frank-secondary:
- Service trio: scripts/{frank-small.env,frank-small.service,
serve-frank-small.sh,download-frank-small.sh} → frank-secondary.*
- Test: tests/frank_small_unit.bats → tests/frank_secondary_unit.bats
- Runbooks: serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-small-*.md →
frank-secondary-*.md (9 files); the FreeToken runbook stays
freetoken-frank-small.md (it documents the retired CUDA-era service)
- Identifiers: FRANK_SMALL→FRANK_SECONDARY, llm_small→llm_secondary,
LLM_SMALL_*→LLM_SECONDARY_*, deploy_llm_small→deploy_llm_secondary
- Historical references to the OLD frank-small (FreeToken/CUDA on the
3090, and the Dankserver service that became frank-medium) are
preserved verbatim — they describe what the service was called
at the time.
The 2026-10-06 cutover crash-looped frank-large 8 boots (03:09:39-03:11:42):
the engine's pin gate refused to start while host MemAvailable was ~74.7 GiB,
3.34 GiB short of the 78.11 GiB it needs (62.11 GiB checkpoint + 16 GiB floor).
It self-resolved in ~2 min when the dying 27B engine freed RAM, but left the
host with only ~1.8 GiB MemAvailable - a restart would crash-loop again.
serve-frank-large.sh now checks MemAvailable against the pin gate BEFORE
podman run and WAITS up to FRANK_LARGE_RAM_WAIT (default 600 s) for the RAM
to clear, so a transient dip boots once instead of crash-looping; if it never
clears it refuses loudly. The 16 GiB floor is the engine's (not
HALOGEN_HOST_RESERVE_GIB=20, a separate overall-budget knob).
frank_large_unit.bats: FRANK_LARGE_MEMINFO seam + a refuse test. Runbook +
log: the pin-gate law, the incident, and the fix.
Auto cache-sizing is OFF on this box: the boot ledger refused it at
36.9 GB (2 x full-entry) floor vs 35.7 GB free, so every deep agent
request re-prefills its whole 79-81k context (84.9-179.8 s measured on
serve_api lines, 2026-10-06) for ~500-650 new tokens per turn. Pin
HALOGEN_CACHE_MB=16384 (>= one full-slot entry at ~70 KB/token) — the
documented override; the per-store reserve re-check keeps the host safe.
Also: the serve script's 'podman run -d > LOG' captured only the
container ID — the runbook's boot-ledger grep read a one-line hex file
and the ledger existed nowhere on disk. Foreground 'podman run' makes
the ledger land in the log file as documented; exit-code and ExecStop
semantics are unchanged. Test seam updated for both.
CTX 262144 / PARALLEL 2 = two 131,072 conversations; SPEC_TYPE=none strips both speculative flags in the serve script (ngram-mod skipped on purpose — on a qwen35 hybrid it disables recurrent-state rollback); ubatch 1024->512 claws back ~0.3 GiB. Budget: non-KV ~15.5 GiB + two q8_0 slots 8,704 MiB lands AT the card — the 2-3 GiB floor is knowingly violated by explicit order; nvidia-smi free at boot is the measured truth. Seam retargeted: shape (2 slots, 131072/slot), budget (two fit, three don't), spec-off (absence of both flags), unit Description.
Frank
