The armed boot reached the engine and died in its own preflight:
halogen npu: /dev/accel/accel0 is here, but this process cannot open it
(crw-rw---- nobody:nogroup).
The node is root:render 0660 and a rootless container maps exactly one uid/gid,
so `render` is unmapped inside it and `--group-add keep-groups` — the vendor's
advice, and the ComfyUI pattern for /dev/kfd — cannot grant a group the
namespace does not map. Measured 2026-10-19 from a `dank` shell already in
`render`: without the flag denied, with the flag denied, with the udev mode
0666 the open succeeds (OPEN_OK). Same wall 99-comfyui-gpu-access.rules already
solved for the GPU compute nodes, so the accel node gets its counterpart:
dankclaw/udev/98-halogen-npu-access.rules — KERNEL=="accel[0-9]*",
SUBSYSTEM=="accel", MODE="0666"
The deployer installs the rule, reloads rules, re-triggers the node and only
then checks the mode; the serve script refuses any node that is not
other-writable, naming the rule, so this cannot return as a crash loop (189
restarts while chat was down is the failure mode being closed).
Both checks read the permission bit directly: `[ -o FILE ]` is not
"other-writable" — it means "exists" and `-o` doubles as the OR operator inside
test, which is why the first cut of the gate refused everything.
Dragoon seam: 33 -> 35 tests. The fixture node is 0666 like the installed one,
a 0660 node is refused with the rule named and nothing rendered, and the rule
file's shape plus the deployer's install/trigger are asserted.
The containment gate added in #44 parsed scripts/frank-dragoon.env through a
$CHECKOUT variable that does not exist in deploy-remote.sh, so the very next
deploy died at `set -u` before it touched the unit:
./scripts/deploy-remote.sh: line 1445: CHECKOUT: unbound variable
deploy-remote.sh runs from the checkout root and every other path in that block
is a parity-twin default (LLM_DRAGOON_CKPT/_VISION/_TOK_DIR), so the payload dir
gets the same treatment: LLM_DRAGOON_MODEL_DIR, defaulted to the deployed path,
compared directly. The seam now asserts that twin against the env file next to
the NPU twins it already checks, and the containment comparison itself is
verified both ways (inside accepted; the old outside path and a shared-prefix
sibling both refused).
The lane's first boot died at container init, not at the engine:
runc create failed: ... create mountpoint for /models/npu mount:
mkdirat .../merged/models/npu: read-only file system
The image ships no /models, and the serve script binds the payload dir
there read-only, so a nested `-v $NPU_DIR:/models/npu:ro` had to create
its own mountpoint underneath a read-only parent — impossible. The
engine's own entrypoint confirms the container path is fixed: it rejects
HALOGEN_NPU_DIR outright ("our NPU models live under /models/npu/<id>/").
Fix is the mount shape, not the engine: FRANK_DRAGOON_NPU_DIR now lives
inside FRANK_DRAGOON_MODEL_DIR, so the payload's single read-only mount
puts the files at /models/npu/<id>/ by itself and the nested bind is
gone. Verified on the running container: after the move, `podman exec
frank-dragoon-halogen ls /models/npu/qwen3-embedding-0.6b` answers with
the staged tree while the lane is still armed off.
Both gates refuse the old shape by name (serve + deployer parity) so a
future payload swap that moves the model dir cannot reintroduce a crash
that lands after the deployer has already stopped the running unit.
An endpoint on podman's rootless default (pasta) has no address another
container can use, measured on 2026-10-19 from inside open-notebook:
- 192.168.0.143:7770 connection refused (pasta forwards the
published port in the host netns; no netavark
DNAT exists for traffic arriving from a
rootless bridge)
- host.containers.internal:7770 200, but the alias resolves to 169.254.1.2 —
link-local, which open-notebook's URL guard
refuses to store
- frank-dragoon-halogen:8731 name unknown: different netns
- --network pasta --network dankclaw_default
"cannot set multiple networks without bridge
network mode" — pasta cannot be added to
So reaching the NPU endpoints from an app container means moving the container
onto dankclaw_default (FRANK_DRAGOON_NETWORK; empty keeps today's shape). This
is not an exposure change: the engine's unauthenticated token port binds the
container's own loopback (/proc/net/tcp: 127.0.0.1:8730 against 0.0.0.0:8731),
so only the API port becomes name-resolvable — the same trust the published
7770 already carries on the LAN. The deployer refuses a network that does not
exist rather than starting a unit that restart-loops on it.
Co-Authored-By: omp <omp@dankclaw>
halogen-flash-server already ships an NPU path on the pin we run: for each
model named in HALOGEN_NPU_MODELS it loads the vendor's precompiled AIE
programs (XDNA2 executes only AIE-compiled graphs) and answers them on
/v1/embeddings inside the SAME container behind port 7770. That gives the
fleet an in-house embedding endpoint without touching the iGPU trunk.
The lane is opt-in and one line wide: HALOGEN_NPU_MODELS blank is the
pre-lane endpoint byte for byte (no device, no mounts, no engine env).
The three host preconditions the vendor names are gated in the serve script
and mirrored in the deployer (the 2026-10-01 twin law), each refused by name:
- the staged model files. /models is read-only and HALOGEN_DOWNLOAD stays
unset so the container opens no outbound connection at boot, so
scripts/download-frank-dragoon-npu.sh stages them from the pinned
revision with the catalog's own byte counts and sha256s (the engine
re-checks both at boot);
- the distro XRT's libxrt_coreutil/libxrt_core/libxrt_driver_xdna, each
mounted twice — where the image looks for XRT and at its own path —
because those libraries find each other where they were installed and
an /opt/xilinx/xrt of symlinks dangles inside the container;
- the GPU fabric clock HELD. On Strix Halo the iGPU and the NPU co-running
hang the machine (and corrupt NPU results) while FCLK changes speed, and
halogen refuses to start in that state; it cannot read host sysfs from
inside, so the hold is proven host-side. dankclaw/host/ carries the
vendor's halogen-fabric-clock{,.service} verbatim at tag v0.16.2 (sha256
a3a4f7f4e0142e71… / 5f9f1cc4c85a1c02…); the deployer installs, enables
and gates it only while the lane is named, and releases the clock plus
drops the boot hook when it is not.
After health, the deployer's lane gate is a real embedding through
/v1/embeddings — a 200 on /health proves nothing about the NPU programs.
Planner: dankclaw/host/halogen-fabric-clock* re-dispatches frank-dragoon
(the deployer installs it); dankclaw/host/grub and the fetch script plan
nothing.
Seam: 11 new tests — the off arm really renders nothing lane-specific, the
on arm renders the device/mounts/env, every missing precondition refuses by
name, the deployer twins and the host unit shape are pinned.
Co-Authored-By: omp <omp@dankclaw>
The service came up internal-only: UI on the LAN at 8502, API at 5056, both
published on every interface, with only its own shared password in front. That
put the episode library outside the fleet's auth chain and one port scan away
from anything on the network.
- Caddy: guarded vhost notebook.franksdank.cloud (Anubis -> Authentik; provider
notebook-proxy, internal_host caddy:8017) plus the post-auth route to the
published UI port. One upstream is enough, because the image's own Next.js
layer rewrites /api/* to the FastAPI beside it — so the API needs no outward
face at all, and 5056 moves to loopback, where only the deployer's health gate
dials it.
- scripts/open-notebook.env: API_URL and CORS_ORIGINS become the single guarded
origin. Left to itself the app auto-detects <host>:5055, the port seerr holds
on this host; a LAN-origin API_URL would also take the browser around the
guard chain, where its authenticated session does not ride.
- addn-hosts: the LAN A record. The homepage card goes live and links the vhost.
- Seam: the API origin is derived from whatever the Caddyfile routes to 8502, so
renaming the vhost moves the test instead of leaving it blessing a stale name,
and a new test proves the vhost hands the WHOLE request to Anubis.
podman wraps a bare HealthCmd as CMD-SHELL (measured on Dankclaw's podman 5.7:
--health-cmd "/surreal is-ready" stores {"Test":["CMD-SHELL","/surreal is-ready"]}),
and the pinned SurrealDB v2 image is distroless — no /bin/sh, not even `ls`.
So the probe could never run: every 30 s interval exited 1 in ~30 ms with empty
output while the database was listening and answering, and open-notebook's first
deploy died at the gate ("did not become healthy in 90s"). The hand-check
`podman exec … /surreal is-ready` printed OK, which is why the old comment
believed the probe worked.
The JSON array survives the Quadlet generator (--health-cmd "[\"/surreal\",\"is-ready\"]")
and stores ["CMD","/surreal","is-ready"], which execs directly: a throwaway
instance of the pinned digest went healthy on that form. The seam is re-pinned
to the shell-free contract; the old assertion forbade quotes in any HealthCmd,
which is what pinned the broken shape.
Frank ordered the adapter; this adds it to the shape as one knob and one flag.
- `LORA_FILE` / `LORA_SCALE` in the env, `--lora-scaled <file>:<scale>` as ONE
argv token so a scale can never reach the engine without its adapter. The
rollback follows the mmproj convention exactly: `LORA_FILE=` (explicitly
empty) drops the flag entirely, no rebuild, and `LORA_SCALE=0` is the card's
own "inert but present" value.
- New fetcher `scripts/download-frank-zealot-uncensored-lora.sh`: `-f`, byte
count, sha256, `--verify-only`, idempotent. The file is NOT LFS (a plain git
object), so the pinned sha is the content hash, not an LFS oid.
- The deployer gates on the adapter beside the pack and the projector, and its
error names the ADAPTER's fetcher — sending an operator to the bonsai9 script
for a 3 MB file is how a payload ships without it.
- Seam: path+scale pinned as one token, the scale knob including 0, absence on
the empty opt-out, a refusal to boot on a missing adapter, and the env ↔
deployer anti-drift pair extended to LORA_FILE/LLM_ZEALOT_LORA. 454/454.
Provenance, stated where it will be read: the adapter's own metadata names
`Ternary-Bonsai-2-9B-PTQ1_0.gguf` (3561df7a…) as the pack the direction was
fitted against. This endpoint serves the PQ2_0+MTP+Q8_0 packing (c79fcdfa…),
which is not that file and is not on this host. The loader matches tensor names,
not hashes, so it applies — and build 10777 is the build the card verified on —
but the strength is calibrated on a sibling quantization. The proof is therefore
the refusal probe against the live endpoint, captured before and after, and not
the card's table.
The NPU path is a dead end for this payload (verdict:
report/tts-npu-spike-verdict-2026-10-19.md); the iGPU is the accelerator that
exists on this box today, and it is already shared with frank-dragoon.
- Containerfile.engine: -DGGML_VULKAN=ON, plus the three packages the door
needs to configure — libvulkan-dev, spirv-headers, and glslc, which Ubuntu's
glslang-tools does NOT ship (find_package(Vulkan COMPONENTS glslc REQUIRED)
fails without it) — and libvulkan1 + mesa-vulkan-drivers (the RADV ICD) at
runtime. No NVIDIA ICD on purpose: one Vulkan device in the enumeration is
what makes the NAME Vulkan0 safe to write down.
- tts-engine-start.sh: QWENTTS_DEVICE -> --device, default Vulkan0. A value
that is set but EMPTY passes no flag at all, which is the CPU rollback; that
is why the default is written as an -v test and not with :=, because := also
fires on an empty value and would silently undo the rollback.
- quadlet: AddDevice=/dev/dri + GroupAdd=keep-groups (a rootless container that
drops its supplementary groups enumerates no render device). The node is not
named: this host is hybrid, renderD128 is the NVIDIA card and renderD129 the
amdgpu iGPU.
- env: QWENTTS_DEVICE=Vulkan0 plus the device law in the header, including the
rollback line.
- tests: the two CPU-only assertions now assert the Vulkan shape, and a new one
pins the rollback (empty device => no --device in argv). 451/451 green.
Measured before writing any of it: the configure in the digest-pinned base
answers "Found Vulkan: ... found components: glslc" and "Including Vulkan
backend"; gate 1 (RADV GFX1151 visible to a rootless container off this base)
is recorded in the verdict report.
FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_SEQS 3 -> 2. At 1.8.1 the budget resolver sizes the KV cache
from the cache bound (--max-model-len x --max-num-seqs), --gpu-headroom-mib and
--host-pool-mib, and the shipped CLI has no KV-size flag (the
--vram-weights-mib/--vram-kv-mib pair was removed at 1.3.0). The live boot
ledger reads that cache at 4.20 GiB = 556,348 tokens = 2.8 sessions at 200,000,
so a third full-height conversation is refused while /health answers green and
the harness advertises capacity the engine cannot honour. Two slots is what the
shape actually serves at the full window; a slot costs KV, never decode, and the
fused TP all-reduce drops from 9 rows to 2 x (1 + spec) = 6, still inside
wht6's 25-row bit-exact bound.
FRANK_ARCHON_HOST_POOL_MIB back to 44928 and FRANK_ARCHON_TTM_MIN_MIB back to
150000, reverting PR #30. That raise bought cache the resolver never hands out:
the two boot ledgers differ in exactly one line -- host_pool 44.47 -> 45.09 GiB
-- while vram_weights (25.81 GiB) and vram_kv (4.20 GiB / 556,348 tokens, both
ranks) are byte-identical, so the extra 640 MiB sat unclaimed in the host pool
while the TTM floor moved out from under the preflight's arithmetic. The
compute-bound cap on --host-pool-mib is unchanged either way (45,568 -> 22,222
MiB of experts either side of the 22,222 clamp).
The bats seam pins the new contract: MAX_SEQS=2, pool 44,928, and the ledger
floor that computes to 148,920 MiB at that pool against the 150,000 minimum.
The 1.8.1 boot resolved the budget resolver to 4.20 GiB of cache a card —
556,348 tokens, 2.8 sessions at full height — so three concurrent
full-height requests are refused with a 400 at admission: the endpoint's
3-slot contract is broken by the cutover, silently, because /health and
every shorter conversation still answer.
The resolver gives the expert plane whatever the pinned host pool cannot
hold and the cache the rest, so the pool is the lever: +640 MiB a rank
moves that much expert demand into host RAM and the cache wins it back.
Tokens scale with the GiB won (8.11 KiB/token at fp8), so ~0.63 GiB buys
~44,000 tokens — 600,000 with margin — at ~2.5% off the expert slab.
TTM floor moves with the pool (2 x pool + 48,824 + prefix + MNBT =
150,200 MiB computed by the ledger test).
Verified by the boot ledger's `kv:` line and the probe's capacity leg,
not by this arithmetic.
The decode stall is step contention (measured: 18.7 ms decode-only steps
against 317 ms steps that carry a prefill chunk, decode at 13 t/s median
while prefill runs), and the two engine knobs that fix it arrived after this
endpoint's pin. Moving to 1.8.1 (2026-10-18) brings both, and brings two CLI
breaks with them:
- --vram-weights-mib / --vram-kv-mib were REMOVED at 1.3.0. The per-card
split between the expert slab and the KV pool is now derived by the
engine's budget resolver from --gpu-headroom-mib, the cache bound
(--max-model-len, --max-num-seqs) and --host-pool-mib, and the cache may
lend idle blocks to the expert slab. The slab size and the pool's token
count are boot-ledger lines from here on, so the capacity contract
(3 x 200,000 fp8) is verified live by the probe's capacity leg instead of
computed from an env number.
- The prefix cache has no disk tier any more: --prefix-cache-dir and
--prefix-cache-disk-mib are refusals and --prefix-cache-host-mib is
--prefix-cache-mib. 64 GiB of parked KV on NVMe becomes re-prefill, so
prefix_hit_rate is the thing to watch after this boot.
env: image re-pinned to the 1.8.1 digest; the pair and the disk tier dropped;
FRANK_ARCHON_PREFIX_CACHE_MIB replaces the host/disk pair; new
FRANK_ARCHON_BUSY_PREFILL_CHUNK=auto (explicit, because auto vs off is the
difference between decode waiting one chunk and waiting a whole step) and
FRANK_ARCHON_PREFILL_INTERLEAVE=0 (opt-in through a guarded argv array).
serve: argv follows the new CLI, /data mount and the pre-created kvcache path
go with the disk tier, and the retired env keys are no longer required (they
would abort ExecStart). autoresearch-frank-archon.sh takes the same CLI, with
a cold prefill now coming from --prefix-cache-mib 0 instead of a per-run disk
directory. run-swift15-bf16.sh is untouched: it pins its own engines by design.
tests: the two budget-arithmetic seams asserted knobs that no longer exist and
are replaced by one seam that asserts the retired knobs are ABSENT from env and
argv - a stale line is a boot refusal, not a no-op. The container-contract seam
now asserts the tune mount and the absence of /data.
main moved under this campaign — PR #25/#26 resliced the RTX 3090 endpoint.
The frontmatter conflict is resolved in favour of the live shape, confirmed
by re-probe the same day: `--ctx-size 602112 --parallel 3` (3 × 200,704),
`--cache-type-k f16 --cache-type-v q8_0`, `--spec-type draft-mtp`, `--jinja
--reasoning auto`, `--metrics`. The 262,144 figures that remain on the page
are era rows and the checkpoint's trained window, not the live shape.
log.md's 2026-10-19 fleet-state bullet now records both probes and the law
this taught: a docs pass that reports live shapes must re-probe before
writing the number, because main moving mid-campaign makes the first probe
stale.
Add scripts/check-okf.py: enforces the OKF v0.1 hard rules the repo had
been carrying by convention — parseable frontmatter with type/title/
description/timestamp, description shape (length, not-equals-title, no
restated quantity), the reserved-name and index.md rules, log.md's date
heading shape (bare ISO date, one entry per date, newest first), the
500-line hint, and the doubled-page signature (a second `type:` key in
the body). Citations are reported as a soft tally, not a failure. The
500-line ceiling is escapable two ways, both explainable: `okf-exempt:
length` in a page's own frontmatter, and pages derived as one-per-
endpoint — live endpoints from scripts/, retired-endpoint era pages from
their tag (AGENTS.md lets a campaign ledger live on the page that
measured it).
scripts/gen-vault-index.py: sibling-presence was tested as a bare stem
substring, so a page whose name is a prefix of another page's name
(`frank-medium` inside `frank-medium-rocmfpx`) silently never got an
index row. Test the wikilink form instead.
scripts/check-vault-links.py: `.AGENTTRASH` is deleted-but-held state,
not vault content. It is now excluded from both the scan set and the
target index, so a live link into the trash reads as unresolved instead
of resolved.
tests/docs_completeness.bats: the same exclusion in both page walks —
trashed pages need no index row, and a trashed page must not satisfy the
docs requirement for a live compose service. Adds the OKF conformance
and index-freshness tests.
scripts/port-census.py: the port-before-cut orphan census used to prove
a merge lost no fact, kept so the next collapse can re-run it.
Frank's order, 2026-10-19: --parallel 3 at 200,704 a conversation (pool
602,112), K at the engine default (f16), V to q8_0, batch 1024x6 / ubatch
1024, and the MTP drafter armed explicitly.
The three requests are one budget equation. At 8,192 elements per token per
cache the pair now bills 25,088 B/token = 14,406.00 MiB over the 602,112
pool, and the armed draft context adds its own f16 KV over that whole pool
(4,096 B/position = 2,352.00 MiB) plus buffers and recurrent cells. Dropping
V to the 8-bit class frees 4,410 MiB against exact V and the ubatch drop
hands back ~1,306 - that is what pays for the third slot AND the drafter,
neither of which exact V could fund.
The serve script's written-down fallbacks move with the env so a missing env
file cannot boot the retired shape, and the seam now: asserts the per-slot
contract (divides evenly, <= the trained 262,144), bills an armed drafter in
the VRAM fit gate, proves the gate still REFUSES both boots this shape can
walk into, pins the shipped MTP set (and the absence of --spec-draft-model,
which would load the trunk twice), and pins SPEC_TYPE=none as the rollback
that strips the whole set.
log.md drops 466 lines of per-swap ledger prose (1,169 lines out, 703 back) and
keeps the causal stories: why the host went down, why a knob resets at boot, why
a stale drop-in served a different model for 24 minutes, why the RAM was the
fault. Date sections are unchanged (65 before, 65 after) -- this is compression
inside sections, not deletion of days.
Every number the compression would have orphaned was ported to its owner first,
and a census of the deleted lines against the whole vault is what found them:
- frank-zealot: the two boots that priced non-KV (20,190/KV 12,800 => 7,390
without the projector; 22,972/KV 14,113 => 8,859 with it, so the vision tower
costs ~1.4 GiB for a 918 MB file), the 1,153 MiB-free 3-slot boot that made
the seam price non-KV at 9 GiB, and the f16 wall's own figures (fit 33,198 vs
23,558 free on a 25,088.00 MiB KV request).
- frank-archon: the pool-cut-is-headroom-not-arena law (2.75 GiB/rank bought
zero slots; d(reserve) = d(arena) = +248 slots; 14.87 GiB / 6,496 slots
against a 398,658-token pool), the MNBT compile-RANGE vs SEQS+1 law, and the
2 x 196,919 prefix-cache proof (393,837 tokens resident above the pool's
386,904; 94.1/102.3/117.6 t/s, acceptance 0.7284/0.7525).
- frank-dragoon: the KL arm of the 2026-10-17 A/B (mean 0.155 / median 0.057,
top-1 agreement 85.1 %) joins the PPL and NIAH figures already on the era row.
- Payload and Disk Reclaim: the 121 GB layer census lesson -- a huge image layer
can be the engine image, not a payload.
Also fixes a wikilink the rewrite had hard-wrapped across two lines, which the
link checker reads as a target that does not exist.
New seam: 'one page per live LLM endpoint'. The live set is derived from
scripts/ (an endpoint has both an env and a unit), and any <endpoint>-*.md page
in the vault fails it -- the enforcement of the one-page-per-endpoint law, so a
re-created era page cannot pass tests.
Frank: "shift frank-zealot to 2 parallels of unquantized kv".
Shape: CTX_SIZE 786432 -> 524288, PARALLEL 3 -> 2, CACHE_TYPE_K/V
q8_0 -> f16. The per-slot window is UNCHANGED at 262,144 (the native
trained window, and models.yml contextWindow), so what the exact cache
buys is fidelity and what it pays is one concurrent conversation.
The POOL is the term that had to move: exact KV bills 32,768 B/token at
this geometry (8 full-attention layers x 4 KV heads x 256 dim, 2 B,
K and V), so the old 786,432 pool asks 24,576 MiB against the 24,123 MiB
the driver leaves addressable. 524,288 positions = 16,384 MiB, projected
~21,200 used / ~2,900 free from the 13:19 boot ledger (only the KV pool
and one recurrent-state cell move).
Also corrects a repo-wide arithmetic error: "f16 would bill 26,112 MiB"
doubled the q8_0 ledger figure INCLUDING its 1/32 scale overhead. q8_0 is
1.0625 B/element, f16 exactly 2.0, so the true ratio is 1.882x. The wall
stands; the number was wrong.
And it corrects a false claim about the drafter: this build DOES expose
--spec-draft-type-k / --spec-draft-type-v (verified against
llama-server --help), so the draft cache is quantizable -- the
exact-KV-plus-MTP exclusion is a measurement gap, not a law, and the
1,088 MiB quantized-draft arm is recorded as unmeasured.
Seam: tests/frank_zealot_unit.bats re-pins the shape contract (2 slots,
524,288 pool, 262,144 per slot) and adds a VRAM fit gate that computes
dtype x pool + the measured non-KV ledger terms against 24,123 MiB with
>=1 GiB of slack -- and proves the gate REFUSES exact KV at the old
pool, so passing means something. 18/18 green.
The omp speech device forwards a voice only when the call passes voice_id - there is no setting that feeds one (speech.voice is the TUI speak-aloud Kokoro enum, tts.localVoice belongs to the local backend) - so every harness voiceover arrives with no voice key and the shim answered 400 "unknown voice None". Measured on the deployed endpoint 2026-10-18, from a restarted session with the speech role pointed here.
DEFAULT_VOICE makes the absent case a spoken operator choice instead of a code surprise: the pack named there answers a voice-less request and the journal line is marked (default), so an unrequested voice never reads later like a requested one. An UNKNOWN name still 400s with the list that exists - the no-silent-fallback law that this endpoint was built on is untouched, and the strict shape stays the code default (empty DEFAULT_VOICE), which the second new seam test pins. Ships narrator1 in scripts/frank-tts.env.
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.
Frank
dank