Every KEY=value is byte-identical to the previous revision (diffed against
git show HEAD: -- 28/25/20 keys). What left is the per-swap narration: the
archon header drops 207 lines of era prose, dragoon 127, zealot 104. Each
header now keeps the format lock, the digest/identity law, and one line per
knob explaining what a reader editing that line cannot recover anywhere.
The facts moved to their one owner: LLM/frank-archon.md, LLM/frank-dragoon.md,
LLM/frank-zealot.md. One stale claim dies with the trim -- the dragoon header
still said the KV pool is ONE 200,704-position budget behind 2 slots, which
contradicted its own 401,408 paragraph; the page carries the correct ledger.
Also kills two wrong arithmetic claims in the zealot header: the q8_0-V and
CTX_SIZE=401408 rungs each free 3,840 MiB at the 524,288 pool, not 8,192 and
not ~6.7 GiB.
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.
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.
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).
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