Knowledge-base follow-up to a45f396. The runbook, both index one-liners, and
the AGENTS.md topology row all still declared FP8 active; flipped to
just1moremodel/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-MXFP4-awq with unquantized bf16 KV (pool
486,464 tokens, full 262,144 window), and recorded the causal nuance: fp8 KV
was on both arms, so the FP8-vs-MXFP4 gap was weight precision, not KV - clean
KV is a quality hypothesis for W4A8, not a throughput one. No verdict yet.
The quadlet's "TEXT ONLY ... 400 here" comment was wrong: vision works on the
MXFP4 checkpoint (Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration carries the vision tower
through the Gemma4 merge path, unquantized) - verified by naming a solid red
48x48 PNG "Red". Comment corrected; harness models.yml input stays [text,image].
Docs-only; no re-deploy (the endpoint already serves vision).
Swap the serving checkpoint back to
just1moremodel/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-MXFP4-awq (quark/W4A8) and serve it with
KV_DTYPE=auto (unquantized bf16 KV) instead of the hardcoded fp8. fp8 KV
stacked on MXFP4's already-quantized W4A8 weights compounds attention-path
precision loss; clean KV tests whether that was hurting output quality. The
freed MXFP4 weights (19.37 vs 30.9 GB) buy the KV pool back, so the full
262,144 native window fits unquantized - MAXLEN returns to 262144.
The entrypoint gains a KV_DTYPE tunable (default fp8, the historical behavior),
shared across both quantization paths; the quadlet sets auto. Rollback: SNAP
back to the FP8 checkpoint with KV_DTYPE=fp8 and MAXLEN=192000.
The template was staged in the working tree (then stashed by a peer for the
prometheus deploy) but never committed, so the live container kept serving
/patches/qwen-fixed-v22.3.jinja. Commit the repo-tracked template and flip
the quadlet: CHAT_TEMPLATE now points at it, mounted read-only at
/templates/qwen-sharp-v22.4.0.jinja. The entrypoint already passes
--chat-template on the shared exec path, so this applies to the FP8 shape.
Rollback: one env flip back to /patches/qwen-fixed-v22.3.jinja.
DFlash2 (100.0 t/s decode, 287.1 t/s burst-4) beats MTP self-speculation
(85.9 t/s, 179.7 t/s) despite a lower accept length (4.24 vs 5.66): the
small separate drafter steps faster than the target's own MTP layer applied
autoregressively. DFlash2 is the deployed shape; both swap-script paths now
default to dflash/7. Docs updated.
The entrypoint now reads the model's weight quantization from config.json
and serves the plain FP8 path (no MXFP4 patches, --quantization=fp8, MTP
self-speculation, ROCM_AITER unified attention with the R4D all-reduce)
or the MXFP4 patch-and-serve path. A model swap is now: change SNAP
(+ SPEC_METHOD/SPEC), restart.
- radiance-entrypoint.sh: quantization detection, gated MXFP4 env vars
and patch block, --quantization fp8 flag
- quadlet: SNAP -> Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-FP8, SPEC_METHOD=mtp, SPEC=8,
KV_MEM=0 (profile the shape, the documented plain-FP8 default)
- deploy-remote.sh: model-aware gates (read SNAP/SPEC_METHOD from the
quadlet; drafter gate only for dflash, r4d.so gate only for mxfp4)
- tests: quantization-aware drafter/spec and KV-pool tests
- hf-fetch.sh: generic, resumable, verified, idempotent HF fetch tool
- frank-medium-fp8.manifest: 17 files (10 config + 7 shards) with sizes
and LFS sha256
The conversation battery (scripts/bench-conversation.py, salted, same 10
prompts, 2026-09-20) measured three arms on the two R9700s:
arm I llama.cpp layer split 32:33 + DFlash2, Q8_0 geo decode 45.7 t/s, TTFT 0.72 s, burst-4 71.7 t/s
arm L llama.cpp tensor split 1:1 (RCCL), no drafter geo decode 30.5 t/s, TTFT 0.71 s, burst-4 54.3 t/s
arm R radiance vLLM TP=2 + DFlash2-FP8, MXFP4 geo decode 95.8 t/s, TTFT 0.21 s, burst-4 259.4 t/s
Radiance wins every axis, so it takes the alias. The board swap is what made
arm R possible: TP=2 was archived on 2026-09-16 because the second card sat
behind B650 chipset bridges with AtomicOpsCap: Routing-, and the ProArt
B850-Creator put both cards on CPU GPP root ports (Gen5 x8, Routing+, ReqEn+).
The R4D one-shot all-reduce needs no RCCL collective anyway.
- un-retire dankserver/frank-medium/: the TP=2 quadlet (banner rewritten —
it is the deployed shape now), radiance-entrypoint.sh, the healthcheck.
The replica pair and its affinity proxy stay archived; one process owns
both cards now.
- retire scripts/frank-medium.{service,env} + serve-frank-medium.sh and
bench-spec-ab.py to scripts/.AGENTTRASH/20260920-llama-layersplit/ as the
rollback path. build-llama-rdna4.sh and download-frank-medium-gguf.sh
stay: they are the tooling that rollback needs.
- deploy-remote.sh: deploy_llm_medium now gates on the image (pull once,
re-tag to the localhost name the quadlet resolves), the MXFP4 checkpoint,
the drafter, the pinned patch clone and the patched libr4d; retires the
llama root unit into the home trash instead of relinking it; then
install_quadlet + wait_container_healthy 1800s (first start compiles).
retire_vllm_medium_quadlets becomes retire_vllm_replica_quadlets — the
a/b/proxy trio only, since frank-medium is installed again.
- planner + test-changed map dankserver/frank-medium/** to frank-medium
and its seam; the scripts-trio mapping is gone with the files.
- tests/frank_medium_unit.bats rewritten for the container contract: boot
persistence of a GENERATED unit (no enable on this host's v1 generator),
TP=2 with the atomics-era NCCL workarounds kept out, the DFlash2 depth vs
the MXFP4 decode-kernel row band, the KV pin's coupling to the shape it
was calibrated at plus pool/VRAM arithmetic, the endpoint/tool/reasoning
contract, and the archive invariants.
- homepage card + docs updated, and they were stale twice over: they still
described the ajgazin Swift 35:30 / 393k payload, not the deployed shape.
Known regression, documented in the unit: vision. The MXFP4 checkpoint is
language_model_only and the launcher loads no projector, so images are a 400
here; the harness's vision role already routes to frank-small.
The vllm-radiance replica pair could not use both cards for one model: TP=2
needs a cross-card collective and the second R9700 cannot dispatch one. The
same wall blocks vLLM's pipeline parallelism, whose stage handoff is an RCCL
send/recv of the hidden state (distributed/parallel_state.py) -- a fact worth
writing down, because the obvious reading of the ask ('use PP to dodge the
atomics problem') is exactly backwards.
llama.cpp's layer split needs no collective at all: layers are distributed and
the boundary activation is a per-backend copy, once per forward pass. One
process, both cards, one model. The runtime is mainline llama.cpp at fb27a525
(the ref is pinned by DFlash2 AND qwen35 MTP; the ROCmFPX fork this host had
before has neither), built for gfx1201 against the private ROCm 7.14 toolchain
the earlier build already used, and bundled next to the binary.
Server: ajgazin Swift-Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored UD-Q8_K_XL with the model's MTP
head in the file, plus the z-lab DFlash2 Q8_0 block-diffusion drafter at depth
7 (its block is 8, so 7 is the ceiling llama.cpp allows). Text only: vision
stays on frank-small.
Retired into the trash rather than deleted: the three vLLM quadlets, the
radiance entrypoint/healthcheck, the routing proxy and its tests, and the two
bench scripts that drove 'vllm bench serve' inside the retired image. The
deploy handler now stops them, waits for 7770 to be released, installs the
ROOT unit and refuses to start anything when the runtime or payload is
missing. The planner maps the scripts/ trio to frank-medium only, and the
scoping seam asserts the retired service dir is gone rather than merely
unmapped.
The proxy trusted its health table, which the watcher refreshes every 10 s. A
replica that restarts — and a deploy restarts both — therefore produced a
window in which requests routed to the dead card got a 502 back, even though
the other card was serving the whole time.
A failed connection now demotes that replica immediately and retries the
request on another live one, before anything is written to the client.
vLLM's OpenAI endpoints are stateless, so re-sending a request that never
reached an engine is safe; a failure after streaming has begun is still not
retried. The failover is logged, because a silent one hides a card that is
down.
Measured with card 1 stopped mid-flight: six requests, six 200s, one failover
line in the log, no client-visible error. Before this commit that burst
returned 502s.
The two replicas behind :7770 were on plain round-robin, which throws away
prefix-cache hits: an agent loop re-sends its system prompt and file context
every turn, and alternating replicas means every other turn pays a cold
prefill. Measured with 90k-token contexts, warm-turn TTFT was 2676 ms.
Pinning everything to one replica is not the answer either — a cold batch
(the shape a benchmark or a burst of parallel subagents produces) then loses a
card's worth of prefill: 16 requests took 30.1 s pinned against 18.6 s spread.
So the policy routes by request shape. A continuation (more than one message —
the agent-loop signature) is pinned to the replica that served its prefix;
anything else spreads across the cards by counter. Measured: 19.97 s for the
burst and 1095 ms warm-turn TTFT — the best of both, without a regression on
either workload.
The policy lives in proxy/routing.py, separate from the HTTP plumbing in
proxy/affinity-proxy.py, so it can be tested without aiohttp, a network or a
GPU. tests/frank_medium_proxy.bats covers it, and it earned its keep: the
first version hashed fresh prefixes to pick a card, which sends every member of
a same-prefix burst to one card (29.8 s, measured), and a stale index in the
pin path returned 500 on every continuation. Both are now assertions.
ROUTING=roundrobin and ROUTING=affinity stay available to re-measure the
choice on this host; the default is adaptive.
The single-GPU replicas died with torch.OutOfMemoryError during KV
allocation (2.16 GiB requested, 116 MiB free, 29.34 GiB already held by
PyTorch) because the entrypoint blanked KV_MEM=0 into an omitted flag. The
image's patched KV sizing reads an explicit 0 as 'profile this shape'; with
the flag absent vLLM sizes the cache from --gpu-memory-utilization alone and
overshoots. Passing 0 literally is the shape the bench numbers were measured
on, and MAXSEQS gets its default back under set -u.
The radiance MXFP4 stack cannot run TP=2 on this host. RCCL's collective
kernels carry a hidden hostcall-buffer parameter, and ROCr refuses to
dispatch them on a device without PCIe atomics: the AQL dispatch fails with
hipErrorIllegalState ("the operation cannot be performed in the present
state"), which is what every two-rank collective hit. The second R9700 sits
behind the chipset bridges 05:00.0/06:09.0, which advertise
`AtomicOpsCap: Routing-` — a read-only capability, so no software can enable
atomic routing on that path and the driver's
pci_enable_atomic_ops_to_root() fails for that card. The first card, on CPU
root port 00:01.1, has atomics enabled.
Ruled out: kernel version (7.0.0-28/-30/-31 identical, after a full upgrade),
iommu=pt, P2P hardware (45.3 GB/s between the cards), the shipped librccl (a
from-source rebuild reproduces the failure at the same call path), vLLM and
pynccl (a bare two-rank torch.distributed allreduce fails the same way), all
NCCL transport knobs, and single-rank tests (NCCL short-circuits at
world_size=1, so one-card success proves nothing).
Deployment: three rootless Quadlets — frank-medium-a (:7771, card 1),
frank-medium-b (:7772, card 2), both TP=1 at 114688 context (262144 and
131072 do not fit one card's KV) with vLLM-profiled KV — and
frank-medium-proxy (:7770), a round-robin that preserves the fleet contract
of one endpoint and one served model name. frank-medium.container stays as
the TP=2 target for a host whose second card is atomic-capable; the deploy
handler does not install it and trashes any stale copy.
Measured through the proxy (vllm bench serve, random dataset, --ignore-eos):
conc 1 42.8 tok/s, conc 4 147.6 tok/s, conc 8 230.8 tok/s, 32k prefill at
~2.8k tok/s per card, TPOT p50 23.6-28.8 ms.
Also: healthcheck reads PORT so one probe serves all three units, the hermes
example and the harness models.yml drop to the real 114688 context, and the
runbook records the full evidence chain.
Rootless Quadlet on dankserver serving
just1moremodel/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-MXFP4-awq (the radiance stack's
designated alternate target; ships its fp8 MTP head, no rewrite step) with
the DFlash2-FP8 drafter at SPEC=7 on the 2x R9700s (TP=2, host network,
:7770, alias frank-medium unchanged).
- dankserver/frank-medium/: quadlet unit, container entrypoint (fork of
serve-mxfp4.sh's patch block at pinned clone commit 97353293), healthcheck
- dispatcher retires the root llama.cpp unit, re-tags the registry image to
the localhost alias, installs the quadlet, waits on /health
- planner maps dankserver/frank-medium/* to frank-medium; scripts-era
mappings removed
- ROCmFPX-era env/serve/unit/download scripts staged in scripts/.AGENTTRASH
with .rocmfpx suffix; seams updated (frank_medium_quadlet.bats new)
Frank