Verbosity 4 paid for itself: the engine's own llama_kv_cache lines give the
exact accounting — the cache bills the K+V pair TWICE under attention_k_eq_v
(6.125 B/elem at f16 K + q8_0 V), reproducing 3,001.25 MiB (5 full layers at
n_head_kv 2) + 306.25 MiB (25 SWA rings at n_head_kv 8, window 1024) to the
byte. The earlier "bill K-only" note was wrong; full layers have 2 KV heads,
not 8.
Deployed boot: 21,868 used / 2,257 free — the f16-K raise (+2,161 MiB KV) is
funded by the ubatch 2048 -> 1024 cut (~616 MiB of compute buffer) plus
variance, so exact K came essentially free. Measured decode 139.9 t/s temp 0;
vision probe returns Red at prompt_tokens 151.
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).
The KLD engine exited clean with the record complete (kld.json rows:
50235, 24 GiB, 5 files), but the wrapper died rc=127: a mid-run scp of
the calib-shape edit shifted bash's lazy-read offset — the fleet's own
script-swap law, biting on the same class as the autoresearch collision.
Resume path: SKIP_KLD=1 verifies the receipt (rows + size + files) and
goes straight to calib. Never scp a script a running process owns.
Execution facts, blocker trail (plugin-tap probe law, weights-slab
formula, KLD_MOUNT), engine verdict, and the post-chain order. Linked
from the docs index per the completeness seam; the cutover runbook
replaces it.
MNBT 65536 / seqs 8: MOE-W4.md:244 measures 640 tok/s at a 32k step
vs 930 at 55k — the KLD record's own rate confirmed step size drives
disk-tier prefill. 131k resident tokens fits the 3072 pool (~237k
tokens/rank at fp8). Cuts the 10M-token calibration from ~4.3 h to
~3 h.
apply-protected-cast.sh splices derive-protected-experts.py output into
the recipe's PROTECTED-BEGIN/END section (refuses to re-derive, trashes
the pre-edit recipe). kld-gate-swift15.sh boots the candidate on the
serving pin in --kld-ref mode (pool fully resident, no disk tier) and
enforces mean KL<=0.03 / top-1>=95% from the JSON report.
One-GPU serialization: the chain waits for the kld driver log to close
rc=0, sanity-checks kld-ref, boots the calibration server, pushes the
corpus at parallel 16 (4 engine slots; queue absorbs the rest), then
kills the server so its trap restores production.
kld died: 'cannot read --kld-corpus /data/kld.jsonl' — KLD_MOUNT was
referenced but never defined, so the corpus/ref-dir mounts silently
expanded to nothing. Add them (nested order: after the /data mount).
feat(convert-swift15-w4dn8): final recipe convert on 1.0.13
Convert with the SERVING pin so the .rad crosses no version boundary;
only the Gram files cross (RADGRAM2 magic, gram.r%d.%s.bin naming and
calib_gram/calib_resolve/calib_stem are byte-identical between the
1.0.13 and 1.2.0 libquant). Host-backend run: prod can stay up.
Gates: grams present (>=48), bf16 container deleted, disk floor,
rad-info gptq receipt, size floor 126000 MiB.
The weights slab derives as card - headroom - kv, and the disk tier
refuses under 9.57 GiB (4.21 layer buffers + 5.36 fixed). 4608 starved
it (8.68 budget, DID NOT FIT). 3072 leaves 10.2 for weights; 4x16k fp8
slots fit the pool, recording is prefill-bound so slot count only
queues pushes.
kld stays on 1.0.13 (record on the scoring engine) with --vram-kv-mib
4608 + 16 slots: the ratio-derived pool came up SHORT by 217 MiB at
32x16k. calib moves to 1.2.0: the RADIANCE_CALIB_TOKENS tap is a 1.2.0
qwen4exp plugin feature (1.0.13 plugin has the DIR half only), and
Grams are bf16 activations - engine-invariant. --vram-kv-mib 9984
covers 64x16k fp8 slots.
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.
- download-frank-primary-swift15.sh: ukisai/Swift1.5-Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
(BF16, 131 shards + index + configs, 360037355038 B = 335.3 GiB, ungated)
via the vendored hfget.sh; verify = listed sizes + 131-shard weight-map
count + every shard's sha256 against the Hub LFS oid. Pattern cloned
from scripts/download-frank-primary.sh.
- qwen4exp-swift15-w4dn8-i8-hc8m.recipe: routed experts with DOWN at
block-fp8 (rtn codes=fp8_e4m3 block=128x128 scale=bf16, the served
FP8-native tile form; moe_gemm_fp8a8 reads it; minicpm5-2b is the
shipped bf16->fp8a8 precedent) and gate_up at w4nl64 GPTQ cd=3;
hc/MTP-fc fp8, trunk i8, lm_head i8, PLE fixed scale, draft_head u2
(inert). Protected-expert cast lines carry the BASE checkpoint's names
as a warm start; the derivation step rewrites them from Swift's own
calibration recording before the recipe is ever run (law documented
in the file).
23,120 used / 1,005 free at boot, 763 settled after a vision probe
(encoder buffers resident). Rung cost 746 MiB, not the transferable
616 prediction. Prefill baseline 1,209 t/s @ 3,760 recorded; decode
unchanged as the law says. 2048 = ceiling for this shape.
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.
autoresearch.sh (dev box) scp's the candidate scripts/frank-primary.env
+ the bench script to dankserver and runs it over ssh.
scripts/autoresearch-frank-primary.sh (dankserver) follows the bench
policy: stop frank-primary (relink unit: stop, not mask), boot a
scratch radiance container (arbench) on the same two cards with the
candidate argv, poll /health, run ONE self-contained greedy completion
(fixed ~140k-char real-text prompt -> ~32k tokens, 256-token decode),
parse the engine timings into METRIC lines, tear the scratch down, and
restore production via a trap. Fresh prefix-cache tier per run for cold
prefill. Baseline validated: decode_tps=31.70, prefill_tps=465.4,
ttft_ms=93745, draft_accept=0.831 at prompt_n=43627.
The writer's 31b1ec3 added LLM/frank-large-flash-server-v2-swift15.md
but did not wiki-link it from index.md, which failed the docs-index
seam (test 135). Add the link as the new ACTIVE frank-large runbook
(supersedes halogen 0.1.4).
The engine's kernel selector reads $RADIANCE_HOME/tune/<machine>.tune at
boot; $RADIANCE_HOME defaults to /opt/radiance, which lives in the image,
so a cache written by a --rm scratch container dies with it. Pre-create
$FRANK_PRIMARY_STATE_DIR/tune and bind-mount it at
/opt/radiance/share/radiance/tune so the rad-tune cache (generated in a
stopped-service window) survives and is read at every production boot.
AGENTS.md: row + section carry the measured 177,109 MiB container, floor
177000, live cutover 2026-10-06. Runbook: the three convert laws the live
runs proved (scale-name, file-shadow, symlink-through), the measured boot
(125.26 GiB page-in 38.1 s, PLE pin 47.68 GiB/43.9 s, ~2 min to health),
the MTP/vision/tool/reasoning contract results, and the SSD tier fix.
Frank