Unit restart SIGKILLs conmon before --rm cleanup runs, leaving the container
name registered: every restart then dies on name-in-use while the orphan
holds the port and GPUs (observed live 2026-09-27, NRestarts=6 with the
container Up and the unit auto-restarting). The serve script now clears its
own name before exec podman run; the deployer stops the unit and removes
the container BEFORE waiting on the port.
HOME inside the container pointed at the root-owned WORKDIR /app, so
vLLM's registry cache write hit PermissionError; HOME now points at the
cache volume.
The vLLM cutover itself is blocked on a structural wall (AMD Qwen4Exp impl
creates the 51.2B PLE table as a bf16 on-GPU param: 47.69 GiB transient on a
31.86 GiB card; the pinned-host UVA path that fits this hardware is
CUDA-gated). llama.cpp is restored live at :7770; host HEAD unchanged.
The llama.cpp b11030 trio becomes the vLLM 0.30 trio ahead of the
FP8 cutover on :7770 — same port, same alias, no client moves.
Serve shape: locally built ROCm gfx1201 image
(localhost/frank-primary:vllm030) execs via podman as dank from the
root unit (LimitMEMLOCK=infinity legalizes the pin). UVA offload:
--offload-backend uva pins the PLE family (47.75 GiB, 138 tensors:
131 n-gram table shards + 7 per-layer conv/proj) + routed experts
(114.86 GiB, 150,528 tensors) in host RAM — 162.60 GiB combined,
~81.3 GiB per rank under TP=2, hence --cpu-offload-gb 82 (80/card
strands 2.6 GiB of experts on the cards). Parsers per the host's
own Ornith-era precedent: qwen3_xml tools + qwen3 reasoning (vLLM
0.30 emits the channel as `reasoning` — reasoning_content is
renamed server-side) + enable_thinking/preserve_thinking template
kwargs. Spec decode stays env-wired and OFF at bring-up.
Deployer deploy_llm_primary rewritten: image gate, index-driven
shard-count gate (131), stale-container cleanup, port wait, and the
false-green hardening — health is only green when the unit's own
MainPID is live behind the answer (2026-09-26 lesson).
Seam tests rewritten to the vLLM contract (15 gates): offload
arithmetic, parser wiring, no-llama.cpp-ism, deployer gates. Suite
349/349 green.
scripts/manifests/qwen3.8-flash-next-fp8.manifest: 144 entries (131
safetensors shards + aux) with Hub LFS sha256s for
Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-FP8. download-frank-primary-fp8.sh wraps
hf-fetch.sh: idempotent fetch, full sha256 re-verify of an on-disk
payload (verified live on dankserver: all 144 files match, ~10 min).
Part of the frank-primary vLLM cutover prep; the serve trio itself
lands with the image deploy.
The stock SearXNG image ships a native kagi engine; enabling it needs an
API key that must never enter git, and SearXNG does not expand env vars
in settings.yml (the live secret_key literally was '${SEARXNG_SECRET}'
until now — the app tolerated the placeholder string silently).
- settings.yml: kagi engine enabled (weight 2, kg shortcut, paging off so
exactly one API credit per aggregated query, timeout 8.0 vs 5.0 scrapers
so a slow paid query is not a wasted credit); api_key stays ${KAGI_API_KEY}.
- new scripts/searxng-render-settings.py: deploy-time renderer, allowlisted
to KAGI_API_KEY/SEARXNG_SECRET/SEARXNG_BASE_URL, fails the deploy loudly
on an unresolvable placeholder, idempotent on redeploys.
- deploy-remote.sh copy_searxng_config runs the renderer against
/opt/searxng/.env after copying settings.yml into /opt/searxng/config.
- KAGI_API_KEY placeholder added to dankclaw/.env.example (real key staged
into the host-side /opt/searxng/.env, mode 600, out of band).
- bats: engine wiring, renderer substitution, loud-failure, deployer seam.
- docs: SearXNG.md Kagi section + renderer law; Providers.md carve-out on
the no-credentials policy (paid engine acceptable when bounded + ordered).
Verified live on dankclaw: direct API probe via the gluetun netns (200,
data.search[] shape), then an aggregated query returned 29/29 results
tagged kagi, zero unresponsive engines.
The first no-redirect HEAD fix read X-Linked-Size on every 3xx, but
non-LFS files on a Xet-backed repo answer 307 to HF's own
/api/resolve-cache WITHOUT any X-Linked-Size header. The fallback to the
stub's Content-Length recorded the redirect page size (254-264 bytes)
instead of the file size, so hf-fetch.sh failed the size check on every
aux file it verified against the regenerated manifest (README.md
"65400 != 254", config.json "72514 != 258", 7 files on the FP8 repo).
Distinguish the two redirect shapes: 3xx WITH X-Linked-Size = LFS/Xet,
whose X-Linked-* headers are the truth and whose redirect must NOT be
followed (the Xet bridge ETag is the CAS hash, not the sha256); 3xx
WITHOUT = non-LFS, where the Location (followed once, via urljoin)
answers 200 with the real Content-Length and a git-blob-sha ETag that
the 64-hex gate correctly rejects (size-only check for those files).
Verified against Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-FP8: all 7 previously-failing
aux files now record their on-disk byte counts exactly (README.md 65400,
config.json 72514, merges.txt 3353259, ...), shard shas unchanged
(model-00002 6841fe21...), total 172.82 GiB across 144 files.
On Xet-backed repos (Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-FP8), the resolve endpoint 302s
to a CDN bridge whose final ETag is the Xet CAS chunk-dag hash, NOT the
content sha256. urllib follows redirects, so the manifest recorded the Xet
hash and every downloaded shard failed sha256 verification against a hash no
download could ever match (8/8 shards FAIL, all sizes correct, on-disk bytes
matching the Tree API's lfs.oid). Classic LFS CDNs serve ETag=sha256, which
is why this was invisible on prior fetches.
Fix: HEAD via http.client, which does not follow redirects. 200 = direct
answer (Content-Length + ETag, non-LFS); 302 = LFS/Xet redirect
(X-Linked-Size + X-Linked-ETag = content sha256). Verified against the FP8
repo: shard model-00002-of-00131 now records 6841fe21..., the sha256 of the
bytes already on disk (cross-checked against the Tree API lfs.oid).
Instrument the live server to answer "can -ot target the most active
layers": AMD IBS op sampling on llama-server during 4 mixed concurrent
generations, sampled load addresses mapped through /proc/<pid>/maps to
backing tensors with extents derived from consecutive GGUF header
offsets (no quant type-size tables - a wrong per-element size silently
mis-buckets tensor tails, first run lost 59% of expert samples to a
junk bucket).
Measured (75 s window, 2.7M expert-tensor samples): per-block read
volume is FLAT, 0.93x-1.08x of mean across all 40 CPU-resident blocks.
MoE top-k routing fires every block every token, so "most active
layers" do not exist at -ot granularity - any 8 GPU-resident blocks
are equivalent, the lever is COUNT, already at the 5/3 VRAM ceiling.
Real skew is per-EXPERT (top 10% of 48x512 cells carry 40.5% of
samples), below tensor-override granularity. No config change.
scripts/frank-primary-expert-activity.py: dump + sample + analyze in
one entry point; --analyze-only re-analyzes saved samples. Instruments
production serving in place; not a benchmark.
Blocks 0-4 on ROCm0 + 45-47 on ROCm1. This exact shape was probed and
battery-verified earlier the same session: card0 2.54 GiB free at boot,
2.11 GiB after the vision graph (steady under load), card1 unchanged
at ~3.3 GiB. Card1 cannot take another block (0.82 GiB would OOM the
vision graph + boot drift), so 5/3 is the physical limit at the
4x262144 / V-q8_0 shape. OT assertion pins the new value.
- CONTEXT_SIZE=1048576 / PARALLEL_SLOTS=4: four conversations, each the
full native 262144 window (per-slot window unchanged; slots divide
the pool, they never multiply it).
- CACHE_TYPE_V=q8_0 / CACHE_TYPE_K=f16: main KV drops 24,576 -> 18,816
B/token (-23.4%); the shared MTP drafter's KV ignores the V type
(measured: 2,048 MiB draft pool = the f16 law at 1,048,576 cells).
- OT_OVERRIDES: blocks 0-3 on ROCm0 and 45-47 on ROCm1 stay
GPU-resident (2.42/2.49 GiB per block, measured); the rest stay
CPU-computed. Measured free under load: ~4.9 GB card0 / ~3.4 GB
card1; a 5th block on card0 lands at 2.27 GB, under the 3 GB
checkpoint floor, so blocks are atomic and 4 is the safe fill.
- serve script: --cache-type-k/v env-wired tunables; ONE joined
--override-tensor flag (b11030 deprecates repeated flags, and the
loader is first-match-wins, so the specific patterns must precede
the broad exps=CPU sweep).
- seams: the window test asserts per-slot = 262144 at 4 slots; new
KV-type test; OT exact-value assertion pins the ordering law.
Both b11030 serve scripts never passed --metrics, so /metrics answered
501 and Prometheus could not scrape frank-large (silently down since
its deploy) or frank-primary. frank-primary also gets -lv 4 (VERBOSITY
env tunable, default 4) for the full per-buffer load breakdown.
The shared MTP head borrows the main model output head, which a -ts 1,1
layer split places on ROCm1. With tensor overrides set, n_copies==1 in the
draft's scheduler, and a borrowed output.weight in a ROCm1 buffer aborts the
draft graph (ggml-backend.cpp:941) when the draft context is on ROCm0 —
the unit crash-looped 4x at ~12 s per attempt during the 2026-09-26 cutover.
Probed live on the host: ROCm0 aborts identically, ROCm1 loads and serves.
Discovery, not guesswork: dump the GGUF v3 headers of the fetched parts
(scripts/dump-gguf.py, added — a dependency-free reader that never
touches tensor data, so a 50 GiB part scans in milliseconds) before
the first load.
What the dump says (parts 2-3, 2026-09-26):
- The 51B-param PLE n-gram table is ONE tensor: per_layer_token_embd.
weight, dims [160, 320001536], Q8_0, 54.4 GiB — exactly the whole of
part 3. It is the same tensor the shared MTP head borrows, so the
=CPU override is required for placement AND for the draft load
(GPU-resident borrow: "invalid vector subscript").
- The model is qwen4exp, 512 experts, top-10 routing
(qwen4exp.ple.ngram_size=3, heads_per_ngram=8).
- Part 1 is metadata-only (ntensors=0); parts 2-6 carry tensors.
The placeholder pattern ngram_embeddings matched nothing — dropped from
OT_OVERRIDES (env, serve-script default, seam, AGENTS.md, runbook,
LLM index) before it could masquerade as a working override at load
time. Deployed set: exps=CPU,per_layer_token_embd.weight=CPU.
Suite: 346 green.
The 2026-09-26 same-day cutover that ended the Lucebox DS4.1 detour:
Dankserver's :7770 endpoint is now unsloth llama.cpp (the b11030-mix
prebuilt, ROCm gfx120X, bundled runtime) serving
unsloth/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-GGUF at Q8_0 — 175.30 GiB across six sha256-
verified split parts — on both Radeon AI PRO R9700s, as a ROOT unit (the
frank-large shape: no container, no generated unit).
The deployed contract:
- Placement law: layer split -ts 1,1 with -ngl 999; the routed experts
and the 51B-param n-gram (PLE) table are COMPUTED in host RAM via
-ot exps=CPU,ngram_embeddings=CPU (the x4-pair measurement: streaming
over PCIe loses at 3.7 t/s, computing in RAM does not care).
per_layer_token_embd.weight=CPU is required by the shared MTP head's
borrow path (a GPU-resident borrow crashes the draft load).
mmap stays on; --cache-ram 16384.
- Spec chain draft-mtp,ngram-mod: the shared Q8_0 MTP head
(mtp-...-shared-Q8_0.gguf, 2,786,568,256 B) at depth 2, with the
draftless ngram-mod matcher chained behind it — the only legal way to
layer two spec implementations in one process.
- Vision explicit: --mmproj names the BF16 projector (this build never
autoloads; a server without it comes up healthy and text-only).
- Reasoning: --reasoning-format deepseek → reasoning_content; the
Qwen3.8 template's {xhigh, medium, low} reasoning_effort gate folded
by reasoningEffortMap in models.yml.
- One stream, the model's full 262,144 context; greedy server default
with Qwen-recommended sampling riding compat.extraBody.
The deployer's deploy_llm_primary is rewritten for the root unit: it
gates every artifact at its declared byte count (stat -c %s, never wc -c
— which read the whole 377 GiB lucebox file for minutes on 2026-09-26),
retires the lucebox user quadlet to dated home trash, waits out port
7770, relinks/enables/restarts the root unit and waits up to 1800 s for
/health. The quadlet-era tree under dankserver/frank-primary/ is
archived (dankserver/.AGENTTRASH/20260926-llamacpp-cutover/ on this
box; git history everywhere else) and its planner mapping replaced by
the scripts/ trio.
Observability flips back to the llamacpp namespace: a frank-primary
Prometheus job at 192.168.0.235:7770 (cross-host LAN — the netavark
published-port quirk that forces host.containers.internal for the two
Dankclaw endpoints is same-host only), the LlmEndpointDown runbook
text, and the dashboard description for three llama.cpp endpoints.
Docs: the new runbook (frank-primary-llamacpp-qwen38-flash-next-q8.md),
RETIRED banners on the lucebox and radiance runbooks and their index
entries, the AGENTS.md fleet section rewritten for the root-unit shape,
and the homepage frank-medium card renamed to frank-primary with the
Q8_0 Flash-Next spec (docs.html #models and the modality note updated:
images on frank-primary and frank-small, audio on frank-small only).
models.yml: the dankserver provider is "llamacpp (dankserver)" serving
frank-primary, contextWindow 262144, maxTokens 65536 (compaction-gap
law: 183,501 + 65,536 <= 262,144), input [text, image].
Suite: 346 green (frank_primary_unit.bats rewritten for the root unit —
16 tests pinning the placement law, the shared-head requirement, the
explicit projector, HIP env hygiene (BIND_HOST, never bare HOST), and
the deployer's byte-count gates; the quadlet-era planner and
changed-tests mappings rewritten for the trio; the observability scrape
test asserts three llamacpp jobs again).
Rollback: the lucebox image (localhost/lucebox-rocm:gfx1201) and the
378 GiB payload stay on the host; the Qwen payload stays fetched, so a
re-swap in either direction is a redeploy, not a refetch.
Fetches into /home/dank/models/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-GGUF/ keeping the Hub
layout: the six Q8_0 split parts (175.30 GiB — never concatenated, part
1's header advertises file_count=6), the shared Q8_0 MTP drafter head
(2.6 GiB — "shared" borrows the target's embeddings; unsloth's MTP guide
names it the recommended head), and the BF16 vision projector. Total
191,919,144,448 bytes.
Sizes and sha256s captured from the resolve endpoint's x-linked-etag/
x-linked-size on 2026-09-26; every artifact is checked for exact byte
count AND sha256, curl -f so an auth error fails instead of writing the
error body, resumable via -C -. The repo is public: no token machinery.
The frank-medium retirement tail the 2026-09-26 lucebox cutover left
uncommitted: the radiance quadlet tree, its swap/fetch tooling and its
seam test are deleted (archive copies live in dankserver/.AGENTTRASH/
20260926-frank-medium-radiance/ and scripts/.AGENTTRASH/20260926-
frank-medium-radiance/), the planner/allowlist/test-changed mappings
drop the service, and frank-large's chat template moves to scripts/
(its old home was the retired frank-medium dir).
Finished here:
- tests/frank_primary_unit.bats: the lucebox quadlet seam (boot
persistence, host-network bind, HIP_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1, HIP-reserved
env-name guard, checkout-mounted entrypoint/healthcheck, first-start
patience, deployer payload/port gates).
- test-changed.sh: explicit .AGENTTRASH/ case — retirement commits move
files to trash, and the wrapper refused those additions with "no
focused-test mapping".
- observability: the vllm: namespace left with the radiance runtime.
Rules keep only llamacpp:* series (prefix-cache reuse, spec-decode,
queueing, endpoint-down); the dashboard drops the vLLM KV/latency
panels; prometheus.yml documents that frank-primary (lucebox) has no
/metrics and therefore no scrape job. llm-fleet.json was left
corrupted mid-edit (missing opening brace) and is rewritten from HEAD.
Suite: 339 green (was 7 red).
wc -c falls back to reading the whole stream when its fstat shortcut does
not apply, and this gate runs over a 377 GiB GGUF: the 2026-09-26 cutover
deploy sat in wc for minutes (30 s of CPU, NVMe-bound) before it could
reach the cutover at all. stat -c %s is metadata-only and equally exact.
Replaces frank-medium (vllm-radiance TP=2) on :7770. The 377.2 GiB
43-layer MoE (256 routed experts, top-6) is mmapped: dense work and the
MLA KV cache on the R9700, routed experts computed on CPU from the
page cache (246 GiB RAM). The unit bypasses the image entrypoint
(Qwen/DFlash-only flag set) and execs luce_server with the DS4 launch
shape; --ds4-fused-decode's monolithic-load fallback IS the serving
mode here. deploy_llm_primary gates on image + model byte count,
stops/masks the radiance unit, waits for :7770, installs and starts.
Runbook: frank-primary-lucebox-ds4.md.
With a missing file, -C - sends Range: bytes=0-, which HF's xethub
CDN rejects with 400. Xet-backed repos (e.g. Lucebox/DeepSeek-V4.1-
Flash-ROCMFP23-GGUF) fail on the first fetch; the old LFS backend
tolerated the zero-offset range.
The serve script only passed --chat-template-kwargs, so the binary fell
back to the built-in peg-native template. A 250-token request produced a
73,600-token prompt (280x the expected ~260). Wiring in --chat-template-file
drops the prompt to 62 tokens. Draft acceptance 0.79 (mean 4.14), model
answers correctly, reasoning lands in reasoning_content.
The build default is 8192 MiB. dankclaw is memory-tight (frank-large's
70 GiB GTT plus the rest of the stack) and Gemma4 runs fully on the 3090
(-ngl 999), so the CPU-side cache is not the hot path. Cap it at 2048 to
give back ~6 GiB of LPDDR. Gemma4 is not a DeltaNet model, so the
>12.8 GiB CACHE_RAM floor does not apply.
Wired through frank-small.env (CACHE_RAM) -> serve-frank-small.sh
(--cache-ram), with a wiring seam so the cap cannot be silently unwired.
The first cutover crash-looped the unit with 'invalid split file name':
the fetch script concatenated the three split parts into a single GGUF,
but part 1's header carries ggml.file_count=3, so the byte-correct
concatenation still advertises itself as a split and the loader demands
a -NNNNN-of-NNNNN filename.
- serve-frank-large.sh: -m points at part 1; llama.cpp loads the split
natively (parts 2-3 auto-discovered in the same directory)
- deploy-remote.sh: LLM_LARGE_MODEL gate path follows
- download-frank-large-unsloth.sh: assembly removed; the parts ARE the
canonical payload, verified against live Hub LFS oids
- docs: runbook model section + troubleshooting note, AGENTS.md, log
- the redundant 87 GiB assembled file is staged on dankclaw at
~/.AGENTTRASH/20260921-frank-large-assembled/
Both pages now group their panels under section headings rendered by shared
renderSection()/renderPanel() components in app.js (SECTION_ORDER fixes each
page's order: user = AI, Web Apps, Media Library Apps; admin = Media Library
Apps, Observability, AI, Infrastructure). The WIP badge splits into WIP: OPEN
and WIP: CLOSED via the wip value ("open"/"closed"); the checker passes the
value through as wip-open/wip-closed. The frank-large card follows the
unsloth llama.cpp cutover, frank-medium follows the FP8 checkpoint, and the
/docs model guide matches. Tautulli (Plex statistics, 192.168.0.235:8181)
joins the admin page's Media Library Apps section with an open link.
lscr.io/linuxserver/calibre:9.15.0 (desktop build) running calibre-server
as the s6 main service on internal 8090 -> host 8084, auth-gated with a
plaintext userdb (mode 600) bootstrapped once by the deploy handler.
The desktop GUI is kept on 8080/8182, basic-authed with the same
credential pair via the machine-local env file.
The verification looped over every LFS file under UD-IQ4_XS/ and MTP/ in
the live Hub tree — the five MTP head variants we do not fetch (BF16,
Q4_K_M, Q8_0, shared-BF16, shared-Q4_K_M) printed MISSING, set ok=False,
and set -e killed the script silently between verification and assembly
after a 3-hour download. Verify exactly the FILES set instead (passed to
python as argv), and report NOT IN HUB TREE when an expected file has
vanished upstream. Also fix the layout comment: the transport parts live
in UD-IQ4_XS/, not parts/.
Replace the CIRU v4.4.1 Orca runtime with the unsloth llama.cpp prebuilt
(b11030-mix-5ff778e, ROCm gfx1151, bundles its own ROCm) serving
unsloth/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-GGUF:UD-IQ4_XS (87.3 GiB, three HF split parts
concatenated) on the Strix Halo iGPU. One conversation, 200,000 ctx,
PARALLEL_SLOTS=1, MTP depth 2 via the explicit -md shared-Q8_0 head
(sidecar auto-discovery does not search the mtp/ subfolder), text-only.
Fleet contract unchanged: port 7770, alias frank-large.
- serve-frank-large.sh: unsloth binary, -m/-md, --spec-type draft-mtp
--spec-draft-n-max 2, --jinja, preserve_thinking; gates on binary,
GGUF, MTP head; conditional --mmproj on ENABLE_VISION=1
- download-frank-large-unsloth.sh: resumable fetch of 3 parts + MTP head
+ mmproj, each verified against its LFS sha256 fetched live from the
Hub tree API; concatenates parts, records/verifies SHA256SUMS
- deploy-remote.sh: LLM_LARGE_MODEL/LLM_LARGE_DRAFT paths, pkill pattern
on the model path (not the binary name), wait_port_free gate
- tests: seams for 200k/1-slot, explicit -md, text-only, handler gates,
sweep safety
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 warm-up request was a warm prefix-cache hit on the next run, so it
hid exactly what the arms were meant to differ on (prefill). Token
counts now come from the streamed usage of each job itself, and --salt
defeats cross-arm inheritance.
bench-conversation.py answers 'what does this endpoint feel like': ten real
jobs streamed once, TTFT split from decode tok/s, salted so no arm inherits a
warm cache, optional concurrent burst for capacity. Needed to compare the two
tensor-parallel runtimes the 2026-09-20 board swap unblocked.
dankserver-route-primary.sh pins eno1 (the fleet address, .235) as the
preferred default route after the board swap brought up eno2 with DHCP and a
lower metric; eno2 stays up as failover. nmcli device reapply, not connection
up, so the link this session rides is not torn down.
librccl DT_NEEDEDs librocm-core.so.1, so a GGML_HIP_RCCL=ON binary would not
exec from its bundled lib dir (measured: 'error while loading shared
libraries: librocm-core.so.1'). The layer-split build never pulled it in.
Layer split needs no collectives, so RCCL stayed OFF. The 2026-09-20 board
swap put both R9700s on CPU root ports with atomic routing, so a
tensor-parallel (row-split) runtime is now buildable: pass
GGML_HIP_RCCL=ON with a distinct BUILD_DIR beside the production one.
The CIRU launcher gates on hip/lib/libamdhip64.so + rocr/lib/libhsa-runtime64.so
under its runtime root and exits 2 without them; the build links the private
venv through its RUNPATH, so point those entries at the venv's unversioned
devel symlinks (idempotent ln -sfn). Without this the unit crash-looped for
the full 2400s health gate on first deploy.
Operator call 2026-09-19: switch the iGPU endpoint from
halogen-flash-server to jcbtc/Qwen3.8-Flash-CIRU-STRIX-Orca on the CIRU
v4.4.1 runtime with the QSA window hotfix (host build against the private
ROCm 10 SDK), one stream of the full 262144 trained window. The service
leaves the quadlet shape for a root unit (the same shape as frank-small and
frank-medium: a private-SDK host binary has no image to install and no
generated unit to dodge); the halogen quadlet is archived, the deploy
handler retires it on the host, gates on 7770, and its stray-run sweep
matches the model path so it cannot take frank-small down.
Operator call 2026-09-19: switch the target to
orcarouter/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-GGUF Q8_0 (gated repo; the fetch script now
requires an HF token and verifies sha256, not just size), take the drafter to
the Q4_K_M rung of z-lab/Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-GGUF, cut the pool to two
163840-token conversations (327680, entirely inside the trained 262144
window), and balance the tensors across the cards (32:33) in place of the
35:30 x16-lean. The in-file MTP head stays one SPEC_TYPE change away.
The vLLM detour (a2b39b1, same day) is retired: the Q4_K_M llama.cpp setup
is the requested shape and the vLLM KV-quant options on sm_86 all measured
dead (fp8 hardware-impossible, int8 page-size unification, turboquant
mm-prefix). Root unit restored, vLLM quadlet/Dockerfile/fetch script moved
to .AGENTTRASH, runbook listed as same-day-reverted. Rollback target:
frank-small-vllm-gemma4.
int8_per_token_head: page-size unification fails (scale tensor breaks
the 256/512 head-dim ratio). turboquant_k8v4: backend validation fails
(no mm-prefix attention, which Gemma4's vision/audio path requires).
fp8: hardware-dead on sm_86. bf16 it is; history documented in
frank-small.env, seam pins auto + no backend pin.
The VLLM_ATTENTION_BACKEND env var does not exist in this vLLM dev
build (warns 'Unknown vLLM environment variable' and is ignored), so
the pin landed nowhere and Gemma4's hook force-selected TRITON_ATTN
again. Pass --attention-backend TURBOQUANT as a CLI flag instead.
Gemma4's config hook force-selects TRITON_ATTN for the mixed 256/512
head dims whenever no backend is selected, and TRITON_ATTN rejects the
turboquant KV dtype (measured: 'kv_cache_dtype not supported', crash
loop). The TURBOQUANT backend accepts any head size and the
turboquant_* dtypes, and the Gemma4 MTP speculator carries the
target's selected backend through to the draft layers.
int8_per_token_head keeps a separate fp32 scale tensor per (token,
head); Gemma4's hybrid head dims (SWA 256 / full 512) make the
per-token page bytes 4160 vs 8256, not an integer ratio, so
unify_kv_cache_spec_page_size raises NotImplementedError — nine
crash-loop restarts measured. TurboQuant k8v4 packs its block scales
inside the tensor, keeps the 2:1 page ratio, and has a dedicated
backend with an explicit Ampere path. 289,647 -> ~772k-token pool.
fp8 KV is hardware-dead on the 3090 (sm_86, no cvt.e4m3x2), so int8 is
the cheapest quant the TRITON_ATTN backend can run: pure ALU dequant,
same backend, no fp8 tensor cores needed. 289,647 -> ~579k-token pool,
two -> four full-context sessions. Quality verified against the bf16
baseline (needle-in-haystack at 213k + short battery) before the swap.
Runtime swap on the RTX 3090 (port 7771):
- vLLM gemma-x86_64-cu129 dev build, digest-pinned, audio extra pip-installed
into localhost/vllm/vllm-openai:frank-small (Dockerfile, no COPY lines)
- google/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-w4a16-ct (10.26 GiB int4) + Google's bf16 MTP
assistant (845 MB) — the w4a16-ct assistant cannot draft in vLLM (drafter
path skips Marlin; acceptance 1.00), bf16 measures 2.80-3.56
- root systemd unit -> rootless Quadlet (dankclaw/frank-small/quadlet/);
manual CUDA device+lib mounts (no nvidia-container-toolkit on host)
- bf16 KV (fp8 hardware-dead on sm_86), 289,647-token pool, 2 concurrent
full-context sessions, CUDA graphs on
- native text+image+audio: the fleet's multimodal endpoint
- measured: pp@67k 1293 t/s, pp@213k 608 t/s, tg@213k ~13.6 t/s,
tg@85k ~17.6 t/s
- host driver 610.57.04 (Ubuntu 26.04); sm_86 is correct, no arch override
- planner/scoping: frank-small now selected by dankclaw/frank-small/ +
env/serve/download trio; old unit retired to scripts/.AGENTTRASH/
- docs: new runbook frank-small-vllm-gemma4.md; AGENTS.md, LLM index,
top docs index updated; old runbook moved to retired
--cache-ram caps the total bytes of saved prompt states in HOST RAM, and
alloc() refuses any single state larger than the whole cap. That refusal was
firing in production: 137 times in the two days from 2026-09-16, at 11.0-11.4
GiB per state, so every conversation past ~170k tokens was uncacheable and
re-prefilled from scratch on its next turn.
The state law at this shape is 68 KiB/token (16 full-attention layers x 4 kv
heads x 256 dim x 2 B x 2 for K/V, plus the MTP draft context's 4096 B), so
8192 MiB held ~120k tokens and 16384 holds ~240k: a FULL 196608-token slot
state (~12.8 GiB) now fits with ~3 GiB spare.
Host RAM only, allocated on demand and never pinned, so the VRAM fit is
untouched. New seam: the cap must clear one full slot's state and stay under
half the host's RAM (it fails on the old 8192 and passes on 16384). Also
corrects the adjacent claim that 0 is the build's default for
--ctx-checkpoints -- this binary's --help says 32.
Frank
