Window 01:24-01:35. Byte-identical A/B (rebuild proved it: same 1,287,656 B corpus,
same billed token counts 59,024 / 21,568): cold prefill 1,585.1 -> 1,616.0 t/s
(+2.0 %), warm 208,531 -> 214,131, needle hit/hit both boots. The 13-16 % that
justified amd_iommu=off since 2026-09-11 does not exist on this host; the decode
delta (-9.7 %) is instrument noise -- three repeats of one request on the same boot
gave 31.8/46.9/47.8 t/s.
NPU precondition restored: amdxdna bound 0000:c6:00.1 (driver 0.7.0, firmware
amdnpu/17f0_11/npu_7.sbin), group 26 identity, PASID width 10, /dev/accel/accel0
root:render with dank in render. No endpoint deployed, so frank-npu stays retired
-- only its rationale changes. Gates: 0 failed units, 32 groups (31 identity + the
SD reader's DMA quirk), iGPU c5:00.0 identity with ATS, dragoon ledger unchanged
(74.1 GiB, no clamp, listening at 39.8 s).
Deferred on purpose: the pp_dpm_fclk pin (changes iGPU timing for everyone, nothing
co-runs yet) and PerfOpt (7.0.0-38 has zero perfopt symbols, 26.04 caps at 7.0.0-38.38).
Re-keyed: decision record banner/front matter/verification/revert + new execution
section, frank-npu rationale, AGENTS key lesson, both index pages.
Reading patch v2 1/2 verbatim: amd_iommu_enable_perfopt() rehoming needs the
device ALREADY on the identity domain and switches ATS/PRI/PASID/GCR3 off via
the skip_caps path. So an iGPU in identity mode still pays a 1:1 page walk plus
those four capabilities until PerfOpt exists -- iommu=pt recovers most of the
gap, PerfOpt the last part. The first pass claimed pt alone already avoids the
cost; that was wrong and is retracted here and in the posted issue comment
(edit 23).
Also re-keys frank-npu.md, which carried the dead law 'iommu=pt is not a middle
ground' as its retirement rationale: identity mode + SVA is exactly the revival
path (amdxdna binds its own IOPT_TYPE_SVA domain), and the cost is single-digit
percent on this silicon class. Procedure step 2 now demands a local off-vs-pt
measurement instead of inheriting the vendor's 13-16%, whose slow-arm boot line
our record never identified.
Records the 2026-10-18 answer to 'does a recent kernel change retire
amd_iommu=off': PerfOpt (iommu tree 2026-09-24, Linux 7.4) stops GPA->SPA
translation for the privileged iGPU while the IOMMU stays enabled for every
other device, the NPU included. Local census proves the fix is absent here
(zero perfopt symbols in System.map-7.0.0-38, archive caps at 7.0.0-38.38),
and the September 13-16% figure was translated-domain cost, not strict-flush
cost -- lazy DMA is the Ubuntu default, so iommu=pt already avoids it. The
corrected procedure therefore flips to iommu=pt now and treats PerfOpt as a
2-4% later bonus on this silicon class (Phoronix desktop arm), with the NPU
legal under identity mode because amdxdna binds its own SVA domain.
Re-keys the AGENTS.md key-lesson bullet; no host change.
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.
Deploy verification for fcd7630 (22:20): healthy in ~12 s, e2e 33/33, and the
boot ledger settles the shape — 62.9 GiB weights locked (0.8 vision) + 7.2 GiB
KV in ONE 262,144-position pool (6,656 MiB, two slots) + 5.7 GiB working =
75.8 GiB in all, n-gram 47.68 GiB read from disk, prompt cache ON (12 entries),
MTP depth-2, no clamp line. Live probes: 27*59 -> 1593, tool call, red PNG ->
Red. The two KV figures are reconciled (engine preflight FORMULA 7.4 GiB
includes block scratch + per-slot O(1) state; the RESERVATION is 7.2).
Also corrects two stale claims: the retired swift15 rows named 200,192 ctx
(raised to 262,144 on 2026-10-07 inside that same era), and the OpenWebUI
frank-dragoon row's description is now re-keyed in the live DB (backup
webui.db.bak-20261017b).
New LLM/frank-dragoon-flash-server-v2-native.md carries the shape with the
three deliberate deviations from the card (served id, SPEC_ADAPT=0, engine
pin 0.16.2), the memory ledger with the PIN_TRUNK rejection, the full
measured A/B table, and the companion law (hardlinked stock peonist files,
engine-tool certified). The swift15 page is re-banned RETIRED 2026-10-06 →
10-17 with its rollback terms; both indexes and AGENTS.md (topology table,
service section, runbook index) are re-keyed, and the root index also stops
describing the halogen-27B page as ACTIVE.
Left uncommitted by the deploy session: the production decode rate (75.8 t/s,
within 1% of the trial arm), the shipped boot ledger, the live probe census,
and the picker-row law (OpenWebUI meta.description is live DB state a swap
must follow into the database, written without restarting open-webui).
The Swift1.5 w4dn8 .rad, the GLM-4.7 GGUF, and every derived model cache
were purged from dankserver (trash-staged, emptied with approval; 763 GiB
free). Rollback of the iq4r swap is now an HF re-download of the
byte-exact frank8465 mirror (LFS sha256 09dd9306...). Corrects the w4dn8
runbook header (still said LIVE) and rebuilds both Rollback sections;
log.md carries the purge record.
kv_attn 26.00 KiB fp8 pages at 607,740 tokens (identical to the w4dn8
boot), slab 17,610/17,658 slots per rank (above w4dn8's 17,548 — ten
bf16-protected experts per layer pack more of the 4-bit table), sampler
9 rows, MTP 2/step, KV lending 4.22 GiB, prefix tier recovered 900,176
blocks across the payload swap. Vision probe green (reasoning read the
solid-red PNG; empty content at 64 tokens = the thinking-budget law).
e2e gate RED on three dankclaw specs: Marreta was down since the 01:41
dankclaw reboot (marreta-browser dependency-failed at boot beside
gluetun, not re-armed); pair restarted manually, redeploy rerunning
the gate.
New runbook frank-archon-radiance-qwen38-iq4r.md (publisher container,
payload chain, shape-verbatim cutover record with the boot-ledger and
measurement slots left open for the first boot, rollback). LLM index,
root vault index, and AGENTS.md (fleet table row, section, runbook
index: iq4r ACTIVE, w4dn8 RETIRED/on-disk, fp8-native deleted). Full
suite green.
Measured, 512 tokens, greedy, cold, at the deployed 3 x 200,000 fp8 shape:
prefill 22,208 -> 3,397, 24,000 -> 3,290, 25,600 -> 3,290 t/s at 43.5k —
the third slab step bought nothing, so the slab is a threshold whose cliff is
the 2026-10-11 arm at 26,071 (4,379), not a slope. Decode ladder: 99.0 t/s
single-stream at 43.5k, 93.3 at 197k (nearly window-free), and 3 concurrent
streams 113.9/43.3/10.9 = 18.4 t/s aggregate — the slot count is paid in
decode concurrency, the axis the shape hunt never measured because probe leg
B generates 24 tokens. probe-frank-archon-kv.py gains leg D (N-stream decode,
512 tokens, per-stream + aggregate) so no resize is priced on prefill alone.
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
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.
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.
AGENTS.md: row + section carry the measured 177,109 MiB container, floor
177000, live cutover 2026-10-06. Runbook: the three convert laws the live
runs proved (scale-name, file-shadow, symlink-through), the measured boot
(125.26 GiB page-in 38.1 s, PLE pin 47.68 GiB/43.9 s, ~2 min to health),
the MTP/vision/tool/reasoning contract results, and the SSD tier fix.
Stop-window A/B, same 80k filler prompt, 128-token essays, runtime
timings: HALOGEN_FA_TQ=256 (upstream issue #12's carve workaround) moves
decode ±0.3% (noise, draft acceptance identical) and costs 9.5% prefill
on this topology. The depth collapse sits deeper than the FA tile knob;
the default stands. The harness's slow/advisor roles moved to
frank-primary (fp8 KV 7.32 KiB/token = 8.7x less KV read at depth).
Probe on the live endpoint (2026-10-06): 17.3k cold prefill 27.0 s ->
warm turn resumes at cache_n 16,384, prefill 1.7 s. The boot WARNING
'smaller than ONE full-context entry' sizes against the native 262,144
window, not our 200,700 slot — documented as expected in the checklist.
Tuning notes record the depth law (decode 5.5 t/s @ 46k -> 3.3-3.8 @ 80k
vs 30-50 shallow; KV reads ~8 GB/s effective; no supported flag touches
decode) and the AGENTS.md unit paragraph regains the unit-facts
parenthetical the reflow dropped.
Runbook reshaped: 2 x 131072 no-spec identity, slot-2 arithmetic (drafter ~0.4 GiB + ubatch ~0.3 GiB bought the second 4,352 MiB KV slot), ngram-mod skipped on the recurrent-rollback law, MTP references kept (44.8-52.1% acceptance, 58.9-66.9 t/s), rollback = one revert of 812d9eb. AGENTS fleet row + section, LLM/index.md intro + entry, root index entry all flipped to the 2026-10-06 shape. 360/360 suite green; e2e gate 33/33 green at deploy.
Boot ledger lines, 19,404 used / 4,721 MiB free (the q8_0 proof), decode arms (66.1 t/s @0.8, 66.9 @0, 58.9 @recipe 1.0 with acceptance 52.1%/52.2%/44.8%), vision Red probe, reasoning_effort xhigh/high contract, e2e 12-crawl transient + full-gate green rerun. Unit Description updated in-repo; the relinked unit picks it up at the next deploy/restart (no bounce for cosmetics). 360/360 suite green.