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.
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- Historical references to the OLD frank-small (FreeToken/CUDA on the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 2026-09-26 same-day cutover that ended the Lucebox DS4.1 detour:
Dankserver's :7770 endpoint is now unsloth llama.cpp (the b11030-mix
prebuilt, ROCm gfx120X, bundled runtime) serving
unsloth/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-GGUF at Q8_0 — 175.30 GiB across six sha256-
verified split parts — on both Radeon AI PRO R9700s, as a ROOT unit (the
frank-large shape: no container, no generated unit).
The deployed contract:
- Placement law: layer split -ts 1,1 with -ngl 999; the routed experts
and the 51B-param n-gram (PLE) table are COMPUTED in host RAM via
-ot exps=CPU,ngram_embeddings=CPU (the x4-pair measurement: streaming
over PCIe loses at 3.7 t/s, computing in RAM does not care).
per_layer_token_embd.weight=CPU is required by the shared MTP head's
borrow path (a GPU-resident borrow crashes the draft load).
mmap stays on; --cache-ram 16384.
- Spec chain draft-mtp,ngram-mod: the shared Q8_0 MTP head
(mtp-...-shared-Q8_0.gguf, 2,786,568,256 B) at depth 2, with the
draftless ngram-mod matcher chained behind it — the only legal way to
layer two spec implementations in one process.
- Vision explicit: --mmproj names the BF16 projector (this build never
autoloads; a server without it comes up healthy and text-only).
- Reasoning: --reasoning-format deepseek → reasoning_content; the
Qwen3.8 template's {xhigh, medium, low} reasoning_effort gate folded
by reasoningEffortMap in models.yml.
- One stream, the model's full 262,144 context; greedy server default
with Qwen-recommended sampling riding compat.extraBody.
The deployer's deploy_llm_primary is rewritten for the root unit: it
gates every artifact at its declared byte count (stat -c %s, never wc -c
— which read the whole 377 GiB lucebox file for minutes on 2026-09-26),
retires the lucebox user quadlet to dated home trash, waits out port
7770, relinks/enables/restarts the root unit and waits up to 1800 s for
/health. The quadlet-era tree under dankserver/frank-primary/ is
archived (dankserver/.AGENTTRASH/20260926-llamacpp-cutover/ on this
box; git history everywhere else) and its planner mapping replaced by
the scripts/ trio.
Observability flips back to the llamacpp namespace: a frank-primary
Prometheus job at 192.168.0.235:7770 (cross-host LAN — the netavark
published-port quirk that forces host.containers.internal for the two
Dankclaw endpoints is same-host only), the LlmEndpointDown runbook
text, and the dashboard description for three llama.cpp endpoints.
Docs: the new runbook (frank-primary-llamacpp-qwen38-flash-next-q8.md),
RETIRED banners on the lucebox and radiance runbooks and their index
entries, the AGENTS.md fleet section rewritten for the root-unit shape,
and the homepage frank-medium card renamed to frank-primary with the
Q8_0 Flash-Next spec (docs.html #models and the modality note updated:
images on frank-primary and frank-small, audio on frank-small only).
models.yml: the dankserver provider is "llamacpp (dankserver)" serving
frank-primary, contextWindow 262144, maxTokens 65536 (compaction-gap
law: 183,501 + 65,536 <= 262,144), input [text, image].
Suite: 346 green (frank_primary_unit.bats rewritten for the root unit —
16 tests pinning the placement law, the shared-head requirement, the
explicit projector, HIP env hygiene (BIND_HOST, never bare HOST), and
the deployer's byte-count gates; the quadlet-era planner and
changed-tests mappings rewritten for the trio; the observability scrape
test asserts three llamacpp jobs again).
Rollback: the lucebox image (localhost/lucebox-rocm:gfx1201) and the
378 GiB payload stay on the host; the Qwen payload stays fetched, so a
re-swap in either direction is a redeploy, not a refetch.
The frank-medium retirement tail the 2026-09-26 lucebox cutover left
uncommitted: the radiance quadlet tree, its swap/fetch tooling and its
seam test are deleted (archive copies live in dankserver/.AGENTTRASH/
20260926-frank-medium-radiance/ and scripts/.AGENTTRASH/20260926-
frank-medium-radiance/), the planner/allowlist/test-changed mappings
drop the service, and frank-large's chat template moves to scripts/
(its old home was the retired frank-medium dir).
Finished here:
- tests/frank_primary_unit.bats: the lucebox quadlet seam (boot
persistence, host-network bind, HIP_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1, HIP-reserved
env-name guard, checkout-mounted entrypoint/healthcheck, first-start
patience, deployer payload/port gates).
- test-changed.sh: explicit .AGENTTRASH/ case — retirement commits move
files to trash, and the wrapper refused those additions with "no
focused-test mapping".
- observability: the vllm: namespace left with the radiance runtime.
Rules keep only llamacpp:* series (prefix-cache reuse, spec-decode,
queueing, endpoint-down); the dashboard drops the vLLM KV/latency
panels; prometheus.yml documents that frank-primary (lucebox) has no
/metrics and therefore no scrape job. llm-fleet.json was left
corrupted mid-edit (missing opening brace) and is rewritten from HEAD.
Suite: 339 green (was 7 red).
- shared/prometheus/rules/llm-fleet.yml: the llamacpp reuse recording rule
divided cached by prompt, but llama.cpp's prompt_tokens_total EXCLUDES
cached tokens (its own HELP line), so the ratio was unbounded — measured
77 on a fully-warm frank-large, meaning LlmPrefixCacheCollapse could never
fire on that side. Now cached / (cached + prompt), with the traffic floor
counting both terms too; the header documents the unit trap. Also fixed the
LlmEndpointDown description: frank-large's CIRU llama.cpp build DOES export
the llamacpp:* family (verified live), so the alert covers all three
endpoints.
- shared/grafana/provisioning/dashboards/llm-fleet.json: re-cut for two
namespaces. Every panel reads both (the endpoint picker selects); the
KV-pool-fill panel retired 2026-09-16 returned with
vllm:kv_cache_usage_perc; the latency p95 panel returned with the vLLM
histograms (TTFT/ITL/e2e); the alerts panel is scoped to the fleet's
Llm.* rules; the stale halogen-era description is gone. All 21 panel
expressions validated against the live endpoints.
- runbook + log + Observability: prefix caching measured, not inferred —
reuse happens at 1,648-token block granularity (attention block size padded
to the mamba page size); an identical 13,021-token prompt went 2.30 s cold
to 0.68 s warm with 9,888 tokens (76 %) reused, while a 2,521-token prompt
registered zero hits. Rule counts corrected to 6 alerts + 3 recording rules.
./tests/run.sh: 325 pass.
Context: 262144 was measured before it was deployed -- 24.72 GB on GPU 0 and
29.14 GB on GPU 1 of 34.21 GB each, ~5 GB of headroom on the busier card, and a
140,069-token prompt prefilled through the single slot in 134 s to prove the
window is real. The 114688 wall was the vLLM predecessor's arithmetic, not this
runtime's.
Throughput, measured through the service: 1.0-1.4k tok/s prefill from 4k to
140k, 43.8 tok/s decode on a 512-token generation, 41-71 % DFlash2 acceptance,
and the prefix cache re-prefilling 4 of 998 tokens on a repeated prompt.
The signals move with the runtime, so the fleet's rules and dashboard are
re-cut rather than renamed: vllm: series do not exist any more, and two of the
old rules watched things llama.cpp does not export at all (KV-pool fill, p95
latency). Those are retired with the reason written down, and LlmSpecDecodeOff
takes one of the slots -- a lost drafter is the failure no client can see. The
observability seam now fails if any rule names a series the endpoint does not
export, which is what would have caught the stale vllm: expressions.
omp models.yml (outside the repo) is updated in the same pass: contextWindow
262144, and the full reasoning-effort map, because Qwen3.8's template answers
500 on 'high' -- verified against the live endpoint, low/medium/xhigh answer
200. Subagents run at high.
The runbook for the new deployment, plus the sweep of everything that still
described the vllm-radiance replica pair: the vault index and its ACTIVE
marker, the superseded banner on the radiance page, the pointer from the
ROCmFPX page, the homepage card, the Grafana dashboard description and the
observability page's scrape table.
The new page carries the two facts a future agent needs and the flags do not
say: llama.cpp's layer split is what lets BOTH cards serve ONE model without
any collective (vLLM's PP handoff is an RCCL send/recv, which is the primitive
this host cannot dispatch), and the rocBLAS Tensile-path trap that makes a
healthy-looking build fail on the first request.
frank-large has no /metrics to scrape any more, and scraping it would be red by
construction: the halogen engine publishes /health, /cache and /v1/* only. That
job is removed with the reason written down (the remedy is the blackbox
exporter this fleet already wants for the comfyui/services probes), and
frank-small's llama.cpp endpoint takes the slot at 192.168.0.143:7771.
Homepage: frank-large's card still described the ik runtime, and the new
endpoint had no card at all. Both fixed, with a loopback probe -- the checker
runs on Dankclaw, which is also what makes the card green-able.
Dashboard: the endpoint picker was sourced from a vLLM-only metric, so a
llama.cpp job could never be selected, and the prose named frank-large as the
llama.cpp endpoint. The picker now matches both runtimes' series and the
llama.cpp targets carry the job filter every other panel already used.
The seams assert the new contract including the ABSENCE of a 7770 target, so a
well-meaning edit cannot re-add a permanently-red probe.
The scraped metrics have no rules over them, so every graph was read after the
fact by a human. This adds shared/prometheus/rules/llm-fleet.yml, loaded via
rule_files and installed by the same copier that ships prometheus.yml (a rule
file nothing loads evaluates nothing, and Prometheus reports no error for it):
LlmKvPoolSaturated kv pool > 90% for 10m — the 122,636-token wall
LlmRequestsQueueing waiting > 0 for 10m — MAXSEQS=4 reached
LlmPrefixCacheCollapse reuse < 20% for 15m with traffic — the thrash signature
LlmEndpointDown scrape target down 2m — both replicas gone
LlmLatencyHigh p95 end-to-end > 60s for 10m — what an operator feels
job:llm_prefix_cache_reuse:rate5m — recording rule shared by the alert and the
dashboard, so the two cannot drift
Every threshold is tied to something measured on this fleet, not to a guess,
and the file says plainly at the top that **nothing is notified**: there is no
Alertmanager here, so a firing alert reaches Prometheus' /alerts page, the
ALERTS metric and the dashboard panel added alongside it — and nowhere else.
Choosing how Frank actually gets paged is his call, not a missing config line.
Seam covers the silent failure mode: rules exist, the config references the
directory, the deployer installs it, and the dashboard graphs ALERTS.
Grafana has been running with zero datasources and zero dashboards, so the
metrics scraped last commit were only reachable through the Prometheus API.
This wires the plumbing and one dashboard, both declared in
shared/grafana/provisioning/ and installed to /opt/grafana/provisioning by the
deployer (the unit already mounted that directory read-only, so nothing about
the container changes):
- datasources/prometheus.yml — Prometheus at http://prometheus:9090, the
container name, not the loopback publish, with a fixed uid so dashboards
reference it without a lookup.
- dashboards/llm-fleet.json — KV pool fill, queue depth, prefix-cache reuse
rate, e2e latency p95, and decode/prefill throughput, with an endpoint
variable covering both frank-medium and frank-large. Every series name was
checked against the live /metrics endpoint: this fleet already shipped one
comment naming a metric that does not exist, and a dashboard full of those
would be worse.
Dashboards stay editable in the UI (allowUiUpdates) because the panels are a
starting point, but the file is the source of truth and the deployer
overwrites Grafana's copy on every deploy.
Planner and seams follow the existing pattern: shared/grafana/** selects the
grafana service, and the tests pin the container-name address plus the
provisioning contract so a rename cannot silently empty the dashboard.
Frank