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.
The parallel session's uncommitted swap, committed at Frank's direction
(commit whatever's in the working tree):
- llama.cpp master on the RTX 3090 now serves ukisai's
Swift-1.5-Qwen3.8-27B GSQ-RCO IQ3_S WITH the in-file MTP head, ONE
131,072-token slot at Frank's 128k cap, q8_0 K + q8_0 V, vision through
the base-model projector; MiMo-V2.6 Q6_K (2x200704 f16 KV) retired to
rollback target.
- env/serve/download + seam twins updated together (deployer payload gates
rode the previous commit's deploy-remote.sh).
- docs: new swift15 runbook; MiMo Q6K runbook retired; AGENTS.md topology
and both vault indexes follow (root index ACTIVE/RETIRED flip, test 135
seam green).
- comfyui: two qwen-image t2i workflow drops under dankclaw/comfyui/
workflows/ (12 KiB).
Replace the FreeToken PR587 endpoint (single-GPU: its TP=2 dies in the
pynccl.cu ROCm JIT) with the radiance engine on both R9700s, TP=2 via
libr4d's fused one-shot all-reduce. Official Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-FP8
payload at native block-FP8 precision:
- scripts/build-frank-primary-rad.sh: staging (quantization_config drop =
plugin SELECTION law) -> checkpoint reshape -> rad-convert with ONE
--quant rule (PLE rtn fixed-scale); plan-only first.
- scripts/stack-qwen38-official-fp8.py: the two value-preserving reshapes
(experts byte-stacked into the plugin's stacked layout; PLE's 128
scaleless fp8 shards decoded to one bf16 shard with the checkpoint's own
scale; the rtn rule re-encodes at that same scale - codes round-trip
exactly and land the one-element scale plane the plugin declares).
- scripts/hfget.sh + verified download (131/131 shards sha256-match).
- froggeric v22.5 chat template vendored (--override-chat-template).
- serve script (pinned ledger: 2x40 GiB pools + 47.7 GiB PLE + prefix host),
TTM preflight fixed for kernels with pages_limit only (no pages_max -
an absent knob is skipped, not read as zero); pages_limit raised to
52,428,800 pages = 200 GiB on the host pre-cutover.
- root unit, relinked; deployer gates image digest + .rad floor 158,000 MiB
+ health; prometheus re-adds the /metrics job.
- rollback: tag frank-primary-freetoken-pr587-20261005 (FreeToken trio +
Dockerfile); payload + image stay on disk until the window closes.
deploy-remote.sh also carries the parallel session's frank-small payload
gates (swift15) - committed here per Frank's direction to commit the tree.
FreeToken has no /metrics endpoint — the job scraped 404s forever, a
structural never-green, not an outage (the Lucebox DS4.1 precedent). The
LlmEndpointDown alert regex self-adjusts (frank-.* matches existing series
only). Comments updated; seam now asserts frank-primary's absence. If
FreeToken grows /metrics, re-add the job.
FreeToken's /health returns 200 with {"status":"loading"} while the
engine loads — the FastAPI front end binds before the scheduler is up.
Measured 2026-10-06: the deploy gate went green after 6s while 131 shards
were still paging in (vLLM 503'd during load, which made the bare curl
honest there). The frank-primary gate now loops until status:ok; the
MainPID stray-port guard is unchanged.
Replaces the tcclaviger vLLM fork with FreeToken at PR #587 head 77a7201
built on dankserver into localhost/frank-primary-freetoken:pr587-77a7201
(scripts/docker/frank-primary-freetoken.Dockerfile: digest-pinned
rocm/pytorch rocm7.14 torch-2.11.0 base, libhiprtc dev symlink, curated
--no-deps install per docs/install_amd.md).
Shape (first-boot conservative): ONE R9700 (second card idle;
--tensor-parallel-size exists for future 2-card tuning), KV pool
--num-tokens 300000 (7.2 GiB at 24 KiB/token; clears the 177,356-token
harness worst case and one native 262,144 conversation), MoE LRU
--moe-cache-rate 0.10, --max-running-requests 2, --max-output-tokens
36864. Parsers AUTO: thinking -> reasoning_content natively (models.yml
flips reasoningContentField on the harness side). Experts + PLE pin
~170 GiB host RAM — root unit keeps LimitMEMLOCK=infinity.
Container identity renamed to the unit name (Frank's call): frank-primary;
vLLM-era frank-primary-qwen joins the legacy cleanup list. Deployer image
gate becomes podman image exists (a local build carries no RepoDigests;
the old digest grep refused exactly this shape). Rollback tag:
frank-primary-vllm-shapeG-20261003.
1862dc3 repriced the Ornith rung (nine full-attn layers: f16/f16 = dead
boot) and flipped CACHE_TYPE_V to q8_0, but its note that the seam was
'retargeted in 8f53df7' covered only the payload paths — the KV test
still asserted the 2026-10-03 unquantized-both-halves contract and held
the suite red. Test now pins the shipped contract: K=f16, V=q8_0,
flash-attn on.
The default-project-set rewrite dropped non---project args (e.g. --list),
so 'run.sh --list' silently RAN the whole suite instead of listing.
Args now ride alongside the default set; an explicit --project still
takes over. Verified: default --list = 33 tests listed; opt-in --list =
34 with the frankbook walk.
The rogue session's Ornith commits (3ee88d7/77decb5) swapped the env and
fetch script but left the deploy handler gates and the seam asserting
the MiMo-Q6K paths — the seam failures 195-203 and a deploy that gates
a file the unit no longer reads. Flip both to Ornith-Q8 (Q8_0 GGUF +
BF16 mmproj), keeping the anti-drift twin structure intact.
The 11-admin spec walked links that terminate on FrankBook-Pro
(192.168.0.112), which sleeps when idle — every deploy gate timed out
there (measured 2026-10-05, two deploy windows). Split: the frankbook
links move to tests/e2e/specs/19-frankbook.spec.ts under a frankbook
project that run.sh excludes by default and deploy.sh triggers ONLY
when a frankbook blast-radius path changed (the spec, frankbook-pro/,
the homepage registry, the Caddyfile arr vhosts). deploy.sh computes
the trigger from the same BASE..HEAD revision range the plan uses.
The first constants were wrong in three ways, found while resuming the
checkpoint (the file was COMPLETE; the manifest was not):
- checkpoint is 35,865,565,184 B / LFS sha256 274c3fc7... (not
35,880,329,102 / 40874e7a...), 1352 tensors per the card;
- the tokenizer is a FLAT tokenizer/ DIRECTORY of 5 files mounted whole
at /tokenizer (model-card docker-run parity; the engine's
HALOGEN_TOKENIZER default is the directory) — there is no
frank-large.tokenizer.gguf;
- plain git blobs (vocab/merges/jinja/config) carry no LFS oid, so the
fetch script size-checks them and sha-verifies only the two LFS
objects (checkpoint, tokenizer.json).
Gates flipped together (serve + deployer twins): tokenizer dir must be a
real directory and every named file a regular file, no symlinks (HF
snapshot links dangle in the mount). Fetch made idempotent: a file at
the published size skips the transfer (resuming it is a CDN 416 under
set -e). Seam rewritten to the same contract, 17/17.
Runtime swap ROCmFPX llama.cpp -> peonist-ai/halogen (image digest
dc0a39a0, tag 0.1.4), serving qwen3.8-27b-p1w4d-d2.hgn (33.4 GiB, the
.hgn format loads in no other engine) with HALOGEN_DRAFTER=2 (DFlash2)
on ONE slot of 200700 ctx: slots>1 disables the drafter (engine law).
Accepted: TEXT-ONLY (vision encoder ignored; frank-small owns images)
and the censored base (rollback = revert this commit; payload, fork
build and build-rocmfpx.sh pin stay on disk).
- serve script: podman run under the root unit, exec podman wait so
Restart=always is real; gates image digest, checkpoint byte-count,
flat regular-file tokenizer, GPU nodes; engine stdout to log.
- deploy handler: gates the artifacts, sweeps the legacy bare
llama-server + old container name by NAME (never pkill llama-server:
frank-small), retires the 2026-09 quadlet, port cutover 7770.
- fetch script: -C - resume, -f, byte count, sha256, --verify-only.
- seam rewritten (17 tests): halogen is now the deployed runtime.
BATCH_SIZE 2048 -> 4096, UBATCH_SIZE 1024 -> 2048.
Why the ubatch move is right on THIS card: the prefill curve is
card-specific. On the 2x R9700 layer-split sibling it peaks at ubatch 512
and every step up costs GiB for no speed; on this CUDA 3090 it climbs
monotonically to 2048 (710 -> 1188 t/s on the 35B MoE sweep, 1944 -> 2423
t/s on the Ornith 8k sweep) with decode flat to under 1 t/s on every rung.
The logical batch is free either way: two sweeps agree that at a fixed
ubatch, 2048/4096/8192 give identical prefill speed and identical peak
VRAM, because the compute buffers are sized by the ubatch alone.
The risk is all in the ubatch, and it is documented rather than assumed:
the step cost ~1,244 MiB of peak graph VRAM on the 35B MoE, the shape this
replaces is 2,815 MiB free, and the Q5_K_M predecessor recorded "ubatch
2048 failed the scratch boot" with MORE free than that. Compute buffers
are allocated at graph capture during boot, so a failure is loud and fast;
the step-down rungs (4096/1536, then 4096/1024) are named in the env.
The seam stops hard-coding a rung: serve_argv now carries BATCH_SIZE and
UBATCH_SIZE the way it already carried CTX_SIZE et al., and the pair test
asserts the argv follows the shipped env plus the llama.cpp invariant
ubatch <= batch. Verified both ways: retuning the env to 8192/4096 keeps
the seam green, inverting the pair to 2048/4096 turns it red.
Frank: still corrupted at ~40k with --no-enable-prefix-caching deployed
and mechanically verified (zero gdn_hip faults in the container serving
that window, coherent 40,771-token boundary probe). The recurrence is
FAULT-FREE, so the align-mode page re-seed is not the (only) mechanism
and the mitigation bought whole-history re-prefill per turn for nothing.
Revert: knob FRANK_PRIMARY_NO_PREFIX_CACHING commented out -> the serve
branch renders --enable-prefix-caching (the shipped contract). The knob,
the branch and the seam stay documented for a future fixed fork build.
Open hypotheses recorded in the runbook: re-fed poisoned transcript (the
same conversation cannot distinguish fixed from unfixed), or a second
fault-free long-context path — fp8 KV at depth is the next suspect. Next
diagnostic: fresh-conversation reproduction, then a KV-dtype A/B.
Two bash defects in the 9d8b185 prefix-cache wiring, both measured live
on the 2026-10-05 deploy attempt (unit crash-looped 190x, exit 127,
endpoint down for the whole 3600 s health window):
1. A # comment block inside the backslash-continued podman run
terminates the continuation: the comment swallows the joined line
and the flag line then runs as its own command
('--no-enable-prefix-caching: command not found'). The comment moves
above the run block, with a no-comments-in-chain note.
2. The ${VAR:+A}${VAR:--B} double-expansion is ambiguous: when the
variable is set, ${VAR:--B} parses as a SUBSTRING OFFSET, not the
:- default — measured render was '--no-enable-prefix-caching1'.
The flag is now branched explicitly into
FRANK_PRIMARY_PREFIX_CACHE_FLAG (exactly one of the two flags
reaches the engine; unset keeps the historical flag).
Seam: the render test sources the shipped env through the branch and
asserts the exact flag word the engine receives (render-assert, the
same pattern the spec knobs use). bash -n clean; all 22 frank-primary
seams pass.
Measured 2026-10-04 18:46:07 PDT (live podman logs): 48 gdn_hip state
faults in one 0.6 s burst — 'state out of ssm-cache range: max|S|=0 with
non-finite values (slot=42 head=3|8)', one per TP rank, 23 GDN layers
each — then the process-lifetime report cap. The guard's own text in
this build names it: 'known Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (QFN) flaw under prefix
caching … Mitigation: --no-enable-prefix-caching'.
Mechanism: prefix caching puts QFN on mamba_cache_mode 'align', which
checkpoints each sequence's GDN recurrent state into a mamba page per
3136-token block and re-seeds it from that page when a request resumes
from a cached prefix. The NaN state landed at the 13th boundary
(13 x 3136 = 40,768 — the reported ~40k mark) and persisted in the page:
every later turn of that conversation re-seeded the same non-finite
state for two heads, silently (fault-report cap already spent).
RAM ruled out the same day: zero MCE/EDAC records since the boot under
test, 8 GiB in-band pattern stable under live load, 4800 MT/s is the
JEDEC floor on 5600-rated DIMMs, and the two-head single-slot NaN
signature is a state-path fault, not scattered bit corruption.
Fix: FRANK_PRIMARY_NO_PREFIX_CACHING=1 -> --no-enable-prefix-caching
(flag renders in both directions from the knob). Cost: every turn
re-prefills the whole history instead of at most 3135 tail tokens.
Seam updated: the prefix-cache pin now asserts the conditional render
and the shipped OFF value. Runbook carries the evidence + acceptance
criteria; all 368 tests pass.
The host region was the ONE arena-plan term still autofitting per boot: with
no cap the planner binds it to MemAvailable AT BOOT minus PLE/process/api/
margin terms (boot 2026-10-05: 237.97 GiB -> 159.39 GiB usable; the same host
reads 75.4 GiB available while running). Demand is 105.48 GiB
(52.74/rank x 2 ranks, 23,040 swap-target experts); a boot where co-tenant
RAM squeezed the bound near that silently pins next-hottest experts VRAM-only
(pinned_extra warning, smaller swap region, no flag change). 120 GiB =
measured demand + 14% headroom on 246.1 GiB total. Semantics verified in the
shipped image: cap binds as the bound, exceedance only warns.
The GPU-side arena is unchanged (deterministic arithmetic over the same
constants): verify after boot that host reads '--expert-offload-mem' and
slots stay 7,762. Seam: red first (wiring + value), then green; full suite
368+1 green.
Frank
