Measured A/B on the shipped pair 25600/5120: A-cold 43.5k prefill 3,290 ->
3,584 t/s (+8.9 %) and the 3-way 197k aggregate 3,051 -> 3,589 t/s (+17.6 %,
wall 193.7 -> 164.5 s). The prediction I shipped with the arm -- slab is a
threshold below ~26 GiB, so 1,600 MiB buys ~0 -- is falsified by the measurement
it asked for. Two slab points inside noise of EACH OTHER (22,208 / 24,000) are
not a plateau. The cliff is above 25,600: 26,071 measured 4,379 t/s.
Ceiling re-derived from the engine's own budget table (card 32,624 MiB, pair at
29,120 settling 2,058 MiB free against its 209.19 MiB floor => 30,969 claimable).
The 29,120 bound was my 1 GiB \`keep free\` reserve; the seam now derives the
number, so the next resize starts from the engine's arithmetic.
Ledger for the record: slab 16,235 -> 17,548 slots while the pinned host pool
hands the same experts back (8,893 -> 7,580) -- the transfer is the mechanism,
the pinned pool is the slow path. Capacity contract live-verified at 3 slots:
3 x 199,984-token prompts accepted (599,952 tokens), fourth refused as too
large to ever fit.
Probe law learned: the oversized-prompt refusal names the prompt's token count
BEFORE prefill (free calibration) and fires on prompt tokens ALONE, not on
prompt + max_tokens; the window is ~514,286 chars at 2.5714 chars/token.
Probe on the live service: four concurrent 196,960-token chats, 4/4 exact
marker retrieval, 787,842 tokens in 238.4 s (3,305 t/s aggregate prefill = the
single-stream ceiling, so the four streams shared one pipeline and the KV pool
never ran short); prefix-cache repeat answered in 1.0 s with cache_n=43008.
Recorded with the caveat that 8 generated tokens do not make a decode rate.
Runbook gains the 2026-10-13 section (symptom signature, the runtime-knob law,
the shape arithmetic, the boot ledger that confirms it: 843,276 tokens =
4 x 200,000, 12 all-reduce rows, 5.87 GiB of KV lent to the slab). AGENTS.md
gains the fleet-row update, the KV dtype law at four slots, the sysfs-raise
lesson under Key Lessons, and the pinned-RAM paragraph now points at
scripts/ttm-preflight.sh as the repair. LLM index entry + topology node match.
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 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.
- AGENTS.md Model Config: the Protoss names are now the ids on the wire
(per-endpoint knob named); verify a rename on /v1/models, never on a chat
response — radiance echoes the requested name
- OMP Harness.md: harness id == served id; one id per model everywhere
- Homepage.md: the docs-page "api id" annotations and the switchover promise
are retired
- OpenWebUI.md: the id-keyed trio (model row, access_grant, api_configs
model_ids) is a foreign-key set — re-key it in the same deploy; plus the
contenteditable-composer probe note
- frank-secondary/frank-large/frank-primary runbooks: served ids
frank-zealot/frank-dragoon/frank-archon, and the bench.conf drop-in that
made every frank-primary deploy since 2026-10-08 04:09 restart the staging
worktree behind a green health gate
- 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 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.
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.
- style.css: green phosphor -> amber CRT-AMBIOS palette; docs styles for
screenshots, code blocks, key warning (full + bare mode)
- index/admin/docs: VT323 from the Google Fonts CDN
- docs.html: rewrite #chat/#models for the live fleet (flash-server v2,
radiance native FP8, Qwen3.5-9B Q6_K); new #api-access with OpenWebUI
key walkthrough + Opencode and Pi configs; three OpenWebUI screenshots
- services.json: AI card details match the current fleet
- deploy-remote.sh: ship shared/homepage/img/ to /srv/homepage/
- docs: Homepage.md theme wave + OpenWebUI.md picker access-control law
OpenWebUI model picker narrowed to exactly frank-secondary (connections
frank-large/frank-primary disabled in openai.api_configs, model table rebuilt,
stale frank-small model_id retargeted to the served alias). Documented the
auth-gated API surface (anonymous probes all 401; keys per account).
Authentik roster gains artem (pk 16) in the human-user template.
kassie (pk 14) and alex (pk 15, deleted pk 7 then recreated) now share the
ridley shape: <user>@franksdank.cloud + Non-Admin Users + jellyfin_users +
openwebui_users. Audit before destroy: the old alex row carried no MFA
device, token, entitlement, or proxy session - checked across the MFA
device tables, authentik_core_token, and providers_proxy_proxysession
(the fleet's column names differ from the ORM names: events.user is
denormalized JSON, certificatekeypair has no user_id). Events survive the
delete, so the audit trail keeps its shape.
Co-Authored-By: omp <omp@franksdank.cloud>
Deploy verified: nvidia-smi 21,436 MiB used / 2,689 free at ubatch 2048 -
the MiMo-priced projection (~21,430/~2,700) landed within 11 MiB, and the
verbosity-4 ledger confirms the KV law to the MiB (CUDA0 KV buffer
12,544.00 MiB = K(f16) 6,272 + V(f16) 6,272 = 32 KiB/token over the
401,408 pool), compute buffers 1,136 MiB CUDA0 + 848 MiB host, mmproj
879 + 248 MiB. Playwright gate: 33 passed.
Two lessons recorded: the 203/EXEC boot loop my shebang-less rewrite
caused (journal signature + the head -1 check), and that llama.cpp's
"n_ctx_seq < n_ctx_train" line is informational when the context is BELOW
the trained window - the Gemma4 drafter warning was the opposite case.
The unit's Description named the Swift-1.5 era (and said 2x131072/q8_0/
draft-mtp); it now names the Q6_K shape. Cosmetic, so it is NOT deployed
as its own restart: the next frank-secondary deploy relinks it.
Co-Authored-By: omp <omp@franksdank.cloud>
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>
Verbosity 4 paid for itself: the engine's own llama_kv_cache lines give the
exact accounting — the cache bills the K+V pair TWICE under attention_k_eq_v
(6.125 B/elem at f16 K + q8_0 V), reproducing 3,001.25 MiB (5 full layers at
n_head_kv 2) + 306.25 MiB (25 SWA rings at n_head_kv 8, window 1024) to the
byte. The earlier "bill K-only" note was wrong; full layers have 2 KV heads,
not 8.
Deployed boot: 21,868 used / 2,257 free — the f16-K raise (+2,161 MiB KV) is
funded by the ubatch 2048 -> 1024 cut (~616 MiB of compute buffer) plus
variance, so exact K came essentially free. Measured decode 139.9 t/s temp 0;
vision probe returns Red at prompt_tokens 151.
Payload: HauhauCS/Gemma4-26B-A4B-QAT-Uncensored Q4_K_M (16,796,015,520 B)
+ the publisher's BF16 mmproj, /home/dank/models/Gemma4-26B-A4B/.
Shape: ONE 200,704-token slot (--parallel 1; 2x200,704 does not fit the
24 GiB card), f16 K + q8_0 V under flash attention, batch 4096 / ubatch
1024, --log-verbosity 4, MTP OFF (the gemma4-assistant file is on disk,
not loaded: its draft KV is built against the target's full window,
measured +1.9 GiB -> 23,806/319 free, no margin beside the f16-K raise).
Measured boots (nvidia-smi): q8_0 K + q8_0 V / ubatch 2048 / MTP off =
21,890 used / 2,235 free; with the MTP assistant = 23,806 / 319.
Engine facts recorded: gemma4 hybrid attention (25 sliding-window + 5
full-attention layers) so KV scales with 5 layers only, and
attention_k_eq_v is honoured by build 5fc4f3c (pool bills K-only; the
measured q8_0 pool = 2.05 GiB = the K-only figure).
Serve script gained VERBOSITY (+ --log-verbosity in the argv), the
SPEC_DRAFT_FILE drafter path, and defaults/lore retargeted to Gemma4.
deploy-remote.sh payload gates follow the env. The frank-secondary bats
seam is rewritten for the new contract (argv-based) and fixes a
pre-existing vacuity: serve_argv regenerates the test env, so
mutations made before it were silently undone - tests that mutate now
exec through run_stage. frank-secondary is the fleet compaction hub
(200,704 is the only window that fits a worst-case compaction input).
Execution facts, blocker trail (plugin-tap probe law, weights-slab
formula, KLD_MOUNT), engine verdict, and the post-chain order. Linked
from the docs index per the completeness seam; the cutover runbook
replaces it.
23,120 used / 1,005 free at boot, 763 settled after a vision probe
(encoder buffers resident). Rung cost 746 MiB, not the transferable
616 prediction. Prefill baseline 1,209 t/s @ 3,760 recorded; decode
unchanged as the law says. 2048 = ceiling for this shape.
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.
Frank
