log.md drops 466 lines of per-swap ledger prose (1,169 lines out, 703 back) and
keeps the causal stories: why the host went down, why a knob resets at boot, why
a stale drop-in served a different model for 24 minutes, why the RAM was the
fault. Date sections are unchanged (65 before, 65 after) -- this is compression
inside sections, not deletion of days.
Every number the compression would have orphaned was ported to its owner first,
and a census of the deleted lines against the whole vault is what found them:
- frank-zealot: the two boots that priced non-KV (20,190/KV 12,800 => 7,390
without the projector; 22,972/KV 14,113 => 8,859 with it, so the vision tower
costs ~1.4 GiB for a 918 MB file), the 1,153 MiB-free 3-slot boot that made
the seam price non-KV at 9 GiB, and the f16 wall's own figures (fit 33,198 vs
23,558 free on a 25,088.00 MiB KV request).
- frank-archon: the pool-cut-is-headroom-not-arena law (2.75 GiB/rank bought
zero slots; d(reserve) = d(arena) = +248 slots; 14.87 GiB / 6,496 slots
against a 398,658-token pool), the MNBT compile-RANGE vs SEQS+1 law, and the
2 x 196,919 prefix-cache proof (393,837 tokens resident above the pool's
386,904; 94.1/102.3/117.6 t/s, acceptance 0.7284/0.7525).
- frank-dragoon: the KL arm of the 2026-10-17 A/B (mean 0.155 / median 0.057,
top-1 agreement 85.1 %) joins the PPL and NIAH figures already on the era row.
- Payload and Disk Reclaim: the 121 GB layer census lesson -- a huge image layer
can be the engine image, not a payload.
Also fixes a wikilink the rewrite had hard-wrapped across two lines, which the
link checker reads as a target that does not exist.
New seam: 'one page per live LLM endpoint'. The live set is derived from
scripts/ (an endpoint has both an env and a unit), and any <endpoint>-*.md page
in the vault fails it -- the enforcement of the one-page-per-endpoint law, so a
re-created era page cannot pass tests.
AGENTS.md: topology row, the frank-zealot runbook section (shape, KV
accounting, MTP verdict, compaction-hub concurrency), and two Key
Lessons bullets -- the draft-context bill restated with the real knob
names, plus a new lesson that a quant's scale overhead belongs in its
byte rate (the 6.25 % invented by doubling 13,056.00 MiB).
LLM/frank-zealot-llama-prism-bonsai9-mtp.md: retitled to the live shape;
the 3-slot q8_0 boot ledger and its measurements are relabelled as the
arm this replaced (byte-identical numbers, honest attribution), the
corrected f16 rate derivation is added, the MTP census is labelled
q8_0-era, the fallback rungs are re-derived for the 524,288 pool, and the
boot-ledger section carries an explicit PROJECTION that must be replaced
with the measured ledger from the first f16 boot.
Pointers re-pointed (live-shape sentences only; every historical ledger
left byte-identical): LLM/index.md, vault index.md, Dankclaw/OpenWebUI.md,
and the retired-runbook "today" pointers in mimo-q5km, mimo-q6k,
qwen35-9b-q6k, swift15, sglang-mimo-v26. log.md gains the dated entry.
The `Voice "narrator1" not found. Should be one of: af_heart, …, bm_fable`
toast is OpenWebUI 0.11.4's bundled Kokoro.js validator: the enum is
Kokoro's fixed 29-voice pack, not frank-tts's registry. Frank-tts answers
200 audio/mpeg for the exact OpenWebUI body from inside the container, and
the failing click leaves no `audio/speech` line in the container log — that
contrast is the instrument. Admin config DB is correct
(engine=openai, base URL :7772/v1, model frank-tts, voice narrator1); no
container env and no user row carries an audio override, so the
`browser-kokoro` choice is per-browser storage. Fix: Settings → Audio →
TTS Engine → Default.
#18 shipped DEFAULT_VOICE and #17 explained why the harness cannot name a voice from a setting, but the endpoint page still described voice resolution as if every request carried a name. One contract row, one paragraph in Naming a voice (a call that names nothing is the harness default shape, not a client bug), the env-file row now lists the default voice among its knobs, and the worklog records the rollout: both merges, the one-dispatch deploy with the 33/33 gate, the card flipping to up on the next checker tick, and the previously failing call returning 430124 bytes with the journal reading "speech voice=narrator1 (default)".
The section this PR adds claimed speech.voice was the forwarded voice key. It is not: the openai-speech transport builds {model, input, response_format, voice?} and sets voice only when the CALL passed voice_id, tts.localVoice is the local Kokoro backend key, and speech.voice is the TUI speak-aloud voice whose enum is Kokoro-only. A restarted session proved it the honest way - the tts device arrived at 7772 with no voice key and got "unknown voice None; available voices: narrator1, narrator2, narrator3" - so the fresh-process success earlier that day was the run that was told to pass voice_id, not evidence of a setting.
The law now reads: voice comes from voice_id alone, so a voice-less call is the harness default shape (the endpoint grew DEFAULT_VOICE in its own PR to answer it), and speech.voice must stay a Kokoro name - a pack name there breaks the vocalizer and does nothing for synthesis. config.yml reverted to am_fenrir on the operator box, and the worklog entry that recorded narrator1 as wiring carries the correction.
Six statements still claimed the endpoint did not exist: both vault descriptions, the two index.md bullets, the Open Notebook blocker, and the engine page deploy order that opened with "Nothing below has been run". All re-keyed to the deployed state, with the ledger the deploys printed: engine healthy 31 s after the build at 4.0 GiB resident, three voices warm, the ladder measured at 1883 ms then 1226-1283 ms (not the retired 6.2-8.0 s), and two voices rendering the same sentence into different bytes.
Adds a The harness speech role section to the endpoint page with the three wiring laws measured the day of the flip: speech.voice is the forwarded key (tts.localVoice belongs to Kokoro), an explicit speech role has no fallback candidate, and models.yml loads at process start while config.yml is read live - so a session older than the frank-tts row fails exactly like a dead endpoint. Fresh-process proof: omp -p --tools tts saved 180524 bytes with voice=narrator1 while the facade logged the matching speech line.
PR #15 corrected the engine's page, the research brief's law bullet and the
warmer's header, but the retired ladder had six more homes: both quadlet files
("6.2-8.0 s… 0.5 ms", "~6-8 s each", "paying the 5.5 s cold decode"),
`scripts/frank-tts-engine.env` (the whole law paragraph and the WARM_TEXT note),
`scripts/frank-tts.env`, the [[Frank TTS]] troubleshooting row that told an
operator to expect ~5.5 s, the research brief's consequences paragraph, and one
test comment.
All re-keyed to what was measured on the deployed container 2026-10-18: the
first synthesis of a freshly registered voice costs 1,883 ms against 1,226-1,283
ms afterwards, so the warm pass buys about 0.6 s — and the reason it exists at
all, which the pages never led with, is that the registry is memory-only: without
the hook every voice name is a 400 until somebody synthesizes. The trial's dated
worklog entry stays as written; the correction points at it.
No behavior change: comments, unit lore and docs only, so no cfhash move and no
image rebuild.
The first real boot gave the chance to measure what warming actually buys, and
the trial's numbers were wrong:
- Empty registry, register only, then time: the FIRST synthesis of a freshly
registered voice cost 1 883 ms; the next two 1 283 and 1 226 ms. A ~110-word
request cost 9.4 s and then 9.8 s.
- So the published 6.2–8.0 s cold / first-audio-byte 5 530 ms / later-requests
0.5 ms ladder does not reproduce, and request time tracks the audio generated
rather than snapshot state. The 0.5 ms figure is an internal state-restore
cost, never an end-to-end request time.
- Warming still earns its place for a different reason than the page claimed:
the registry is memory-only and re-registering does not warm, so a boot without
the hook leaves the façade answering 400 for every name. The saving is ~0.6 s.
Law 1 of [[Frank TTS Engine]] is re-titled the registry law and carries the
measured numbers; its example journal line is a real one from today; the
troubleshooting row for "first request of the day is slow" — the retired law's
symptom — is replaced by the argument-cap fault that actually happened. The same
ladder in the research brief is annotated rather than erased, and [[Voice Packs]]
step 6 stops claiming the hook registers only packs it has not seen (the engine
replaces a name it already holds).
The vault link check reads [[Frank TTS Engine]] literally, so wrapping it made
the target "Frank\nTTS Engine" and the unresolved-link seam failed. Rewrapped,
not reworded.
Three faults, all of the reporting-success-while-doing-nothing species: the
build that could not start (no adduser in the base), the warm pass that could
not warm (podman's --env-file keeps the quotes), and the image that would never
rebuild (cfhash over the Containerfile alone). Records the proofs, the two
behaviour seams, and what stays undone: nothing is deployed, #2 phase 1 stays
open until 7772 answers.
Stage 2 of the voice stack. Repo state only: nothing deployed, no host touched,
no container started.
- `frank-tts` is now registered everywhere a dankclaw service has to be:
`SERVICE_ORDER` (after `frank-tts-engine`, before the consumers), the planner's
dankclaw set, `deploy-remote.sh`'s allowlist + dispatch + a
`deploy_frank_tts` handler, and `deploy.sh`'s dispatch regex — plus the
`build_compose_image` arm naming `dankclaw/voiceservice/Containerfile`, without
which the build silently returns 0 and the unit's `Pull=never` tag never
exists.
- The unit joins TWO networks, in order: `dankclaw_default` first (default route,
where consumers and open-notebook live), then the voice bridge. `TTS_UPSTREAM`
moves from `host.containers.internal:8880` to `http://frank-tts-engine:8880` —
the actual fix for a shape that could never work, since a bridge container
cannot reach a host-loopback bind and the engine publishes nothing at all.
- `Wants=`/`After=` on the engine, never `Requires=`: the `llama-tts-cli` rollback
backend needs no upstream, so a broken engine may delay this endpoint but must
not take its unit down.
- The handler installs the engine's quadlet pair too, because a referenced
`Network=` file the generator cannot find means no façade unit is produced at
all, and `--only frank-tts` has no other way to get it. It creates
`/home/dank/voices` as the deploy user (rootless podman would auto-create a
missing bind source root-owned, which reads as "no voices"), and gates on
podman's recorded health.
- Voice naming is now written down where it can be found: a voice is a lowercase
directory name matching `^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9._-]*$`, at most 64 chars. That shape
is the intersection of two rules that disagree — the shim would accept mixed
case, the engine lowercases names — so a mixed-case pack resolves on one side
only, and the boot warmer refuses it loudly. `narrator1/2/3` are load-bearing
for open-notebook.
- Homepage card for the pair, `wip: down` and hidden, probing `127.0.0.1:7772`;
the engine gets no card because it publishes nothing and could never be probed.
- **No Prometheus job, deliberately.** No `/metrics` exists on the shim, this
Prometheus 3 refuses HTML/JSON bodies (the existing `comfyui` and `services`
probes are documented down for exactly that), and `LlmEndpointDown` is scoped
`up{job=~"frank-.*"}` — so a `/health` job would page on Signal for a healthy
endpoint. Recorded in the page instead of quietly skipped.
- Vault: new [[Frank TTS]] page linked from the index; [[Frank TTS Engine]] now
points at it for the pair's public signal; log entry for the day.
- Seam grows to 25 tests: the generator's rendering of the pair (both
attachments, first-network order, one publish, Wants-not-Requires, bounded
per-unit blocks), the env file's upstream checked as a network JOIN rather than
a string, planner separation and order, the handler's steps, the card's gating,
routing that selects both seams for either deployable.
Repo state only: nothing deployed, no host touched, no container started.
- `frank-tts-engine` on Dankclaw: `qwentts.cpp` commit
5916bf7c79dbb4e66fc059cdc507a79a23a28bb4, resident `tts-server`, 1.7 B base
talker Q4_K_M + Q8_0 tokenizer, container port 8880. It is deliberately NOT a
fleet endpoint — `frank-tts` on 7772 is the endpoint consumers address.
- Publishes NOTHING. A host-loopback publish would have been useless to the
façade (netavark DNATs published ports only, so a bridge container cannot
reach a host loopback bind — the shape that 502'd hermes) and would have been
the one LAN-reachable surface of an unauthenticated synthesiser. Both voice
containers sit on one committed quadlet network, `frank-tts-engine.network`
pinned to 10.89.5.0/24 (next free /24 after open-notebook's 10.89.4.0/24), and
peers address the engine by container name. Diagnostics and the deployer's
health gate run inside the netns (`podman exec`, `wait_container_healthy`).
- Cold-voice law honoured in the unit: the first request for a registered voice
decodes its whole reference to snapshot codec state (6.2-8.0 s, first audio
byte 5 530 ms), later ones restore in 0.5 ms, and the registry is memory-only.
`ExecStartPost=-/usr/bin/podman exec frank-tts-engine /app/warm-voices.sh`
with `TimeoutStartSec=900`; the `-` prefix keeps a failed warm from
crash-looping the endpoint under `Restart=always`. It logs cold=/warm= per
voice, so the under-a-second second request is proven on every boot.
- Thread law recorded: `tts-server` has no `--threads`; src/backend.h uses
hardware_concurrency()/2, so a cpuset pin silently changes the thread count.
- Image builds from the pinned commit with the proven line (GGML_BLAS=OFF
forced by this host, every GPU backend off, -j 8, no -DGGML_NATIVE because
ggml defaults to -march=native for the building host). Two stages; the runtime
stage COPYs both the entrypoint and the warmer, because a container that
publishes nothing is reached with `podman exec`, not a port.
- `scripts/download-frank-tts-engine-qwentts.sh` fetches the two GGUFs with byte
and LFS-oid checks (talker 1 219 245 248 B, tokenizer 291 150 624 B); the
deployer gates on --verify-only instead of pulling 1.4 GiB mid-deploy.
- Registered in SERVICE_ORDER, DANKCLAW_SERVICES, the deploy-remote.sh dispatch,
its pre-deploy requirement, deploy.sh's regex, the planner's path map (the
whole `dankclaw/voiceservice/` tree mapped to nothing before this), and
test-changed.sh ABOVE the `dankclaw/*.container` case whose `*` crosses `/`.
- New seam tests/frank_tts_engine.bats (19): the Quadlet generator's own output
for network/publish/boot/warm shape, entrypoint argv driven from the tracked
env file, the warmer against a stub tts-server over a real socket
(registration keys, ref_text absent, late engine, hung synthesis, name
refusal), the fetcher's verifier, the pinned cmake line, and both routing
tables. Suite: 422 passed.
- Vault: [[Frank TTS Engine]] linked from the index; log.md entry for the day.
The page a new operator needs: what the three required files are and who
reads each one, how a pack is built (with the extractor's usage text
verbatim, because the flags are not guessable and there is no -o), the
10-second gate and where it fires twice, how to add a fourth voice
including the warm hook that registers a pack without restarting the
engine, and the engine-bump procedure for when the artifact sizes move.
Plus the host census as of 2026-10-18 — the trial packs carry no
artifacts and their manifest is the trial's own schema, so the builder's
first real run is a --force migration — and the three gaps left open on
purpose: no curated ICL transcript, no 16 kHz variant, no loudness pass.
Linked from the Dankclaw services list; log entry appended oldest-first.
Frank heard every audition pair and passed it, so likeness stopped being the
tiebreak and the engine was picked on the live-output criterion: arm A
qwentts.cpp 5916bf7, resident tts-server, 1.7 B talker, llama-tts-cli kept as
the rollback. Records the discriminators (first audio byte, warm RTF, spread),
the three consequences that are configuration (boot-warm every voice, no cpuset
pin, WAV-only registration), the two follow-ups left open on purpose, and the
corrected addressing law: a host-loopback publish is unreachable from a bridge
container, so the pair shares one quadlet network.
The env file first landed with ESPERANTO_TTS_TIMEOUT equal to SHIM_TIMEOUT=600.
Equality is a race: both budgets expire at the same instant, so the case the
number existed to prevent — the worker abandoning a synthesis frank-tts is still
finishing — is exactly what happens on the tail of a long line. Nested budgets
go inside-out, which is the rule scripts/frank-tts.env states for its own
LLAMA_TIMEOUT; the client waits one round-trip longer than the server, so a
frank-tts give-up arrives labelled as frank-tts's error. 660.
The seam's assertion moves from equality to `>` for the same reason, and now
also holds ESPERANTO_LLM_TIMEOUT under upstream's 600 s web-UI patience — above
it the failure surfaces as a UI timeout with no name on it. The scriptwriting
number itself stays at the app's 180 s default: frank-zealot answers an outline
or a transcript well inside it, which corrects the earlier commit message's
claim that both timeouts were raised past upstream's 300 s.
Page registered in the vault index (the docs-completeness seam fails an
unregistered page) and logged in the bundle change log.
What the page owes the reader: the provider contract (frank-zealot for scripts
with a /v1 base URL, frank-tts for voices with 1-4 speakers mapped to the
narrator1/2/3 voice packs typed as free text), why Test Connection and Discover
Models fail cosmetically against frank-tts rather than being a fault, the
encryption key as the precondition for saving any credential, and the honest
blocker — frank-tts is not deployed and nothing listens on 7772, so a generation
run writes its script and fails on the first voice.
Episode destination is stated as interim and cites Gitea issue #7 (human-only,
agents must not work it): the app keeps its named volume, one bind mount puts
finished MP3s under /home/dank/media/podcasts, and deleting that one line is the
whole rollback. Rollback section also covers the full undo, including that the
podman network only disappears once the units are gone.
The dragoon-window provenance bullet still said the zealot arm owed a
measurement — it does not: the numbers are recovered and in the fetch script and
runbook. Adds the frank-tts phase-1 entry (naming law, port 7772, voice-pack law,
384/384 suite, PR #4 merged as 49c4e19, and the measured Gitea merge-field law).
Frank's 02:36 instruction (archive 01a14c93) ordered the 27B PTQ1_0 arm at
2 x 200,704 with the Q8 mmproj and batch/ubatch 3072/1536; it served
production 03:14:39-03:38:57 (pid 191358, journal type ptq1_0: 402 tensors).
Recovered its numbers from that process's own print_timing lines: ~48 t/s
single-stream decode, 25-27 t/s per stream at two streams, prefill 1,295 t/s
at 30,637 -> 943 at 97,856 -> 801 at 141,365. It bought the promised 1,201 MiB
and lost 37% of decode against the PQ2_0 record, so the publisher's Ampere
warning generalizes to GA102; Frank scratched the 27B plan at 03:33 for the 9B.
Every 'unfinished experiment' claim is re-keyed, and the AGENTS.md law gains
the durable lesson: a bench verdict that never reaches the repo is
indistinguishable from a rogue arm.
Post-deploy probe on frank-dragoon: one 101,987-token prompt through
/v1/chat/completions took 81.5 s cold (1,251 t/s of prefill) and 0.3 s on two
repeats — HALOGEN_CACHE_INPLACE=1 keeps the KV rows in the pool, so doubling the
pool evicted nothing the prompt cache needed. The RAM price is still real:
MemAvailable 26 -> 22 GiB.
Census of the same engine's surface corrected the Benchmarking Policy, which
quoted llama.cpp instruments at a halogen endpoint: frank-dragoon answers
/health, /metrics, /v1/models and POST /v1/chat/completions and 404s /ping,
/props, /completion and /tokenize, and no response carries Server-Timing. The
/completion `timings` object and the ttft;dur= header are frank-zealot's; on
frank-dragoon the instrument is wall clock plus usage.prompt_tokens.
Deployed 2026-10-18 (e2e 33/33). The boot ledger prints
`reserving the KV pool, 401408 positions (about 11.0 GiB)` and
`62.9 GiB of weights locked … 11.0 GiB of KV pool, 5.7 GiB of working memory,
79.6 GiB in all`, so the ~10.8 GiB that every page quoted from the
~28 KiB/position arithmetic is replaced by the reservation the engine actually
makes (11.0) and its preflight bill (11.3). Host MemAvailable fell 26 -> 22 GiB
across the raise: the FLAGS.md collision (pool RAM is n-gram page cache) paid in
full, so the warm prompt-cache ratio is flagged as the number to watch.
All "committed but not yet deployed" clauses retired: AGENTS.md topology row,
KV-pool law and memory ledger, frank-dragoon.env lore, both index pages, the
iommu page, and the runbook chronology (third production boot recorded).
The sweep also caught the LLM index still describing frank-zealot as
Bonsai-2-27B at 2 x 200,704 in its intro and topology diagram - re-keyed to the
live 9B: 8 full-attention + 24 Gated DeltaNet + blk.32 MTP, 3 x 262,144,
tensor type 141.
The cutover deploy's FIRST boot was not the shipped payload: a stale
frank-zealot.service.d/ptq1.conf from the bench window still pointed
FRANK_ZEALOT_ENV_FILE at /tmp/zealot-arm-current.env, so the unit booted the
unmeasured 27B PTQ1_0 arm (3 slots of 133,888, 21,188 MiB) while /health
answered 200, /v1/models echoed the alias and the e2e gate passed 33/33.
Drop-in retired to ~/.AGENTTRASH/20261018-zealot-ptq1-arm/; the 13:19 restart
is the shape the docs now quote (n_ctx_slot 262144, KV 13,056.00 MiB,
settled 17,922/6,203).
Corrections the production ledger forced:
- RS buffer is 150.75 MiB (3 cells) on the shipped spec-off shape; 452.25 MiB
belongs to the SPEC-ARMED arms, where MTP depth 2 bills three seqs per slot.
The drafter triples the recurrent state on top of its 3,072 MiB of f16 KV.
- Decode measured 168.4-168.7 t/s single-stream and ~300 t/s aggregate over
three streams (102.8 each). Wall-clock timing of a generation that stops on
its own reads 4x low (72 t/s for a 24-token countdown) - measure with
ignore_eos and read the engine's timings.
- OpenWebUI stores both decoration values inside JSON columns (params/meta),
and frank-dragoon's context.length had drifted to 262,144 against its own
200,704 ceiling; both re-keyed in the live DB.
New law in AGENTS.md: after deploying a recently-benched LLM service, check
DropInPaths, then /proc/<pid>/cmdline, then the ledger. Health checks cannot
see the payload.
Swap the 3090 endpoint from Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B PQ2_0 (2 x 200,704,
fork build 10754) to Ternary-Bonsai-2-9B PQ2_0 with the MTP head IN the
file, three conversations at the trained 262,144 window
(--ctx-size 786432 --parallel 3), on vendor fork build 10777 -- the
minimum build that pairs MTP with a quantized V cache. q8_0 K + q8_0 V
is the only KV that fits: 13,056 MiB against a 26,112 MiB f16 pair.
Settled boot 17,876 used / 6,249 free.
MTP is armed and then DECLINED by measurement: the draft context bills
its own f16 KV over the whole pool (3,072 MiB) and at UBATCH_SIZE=2048
that halves decode (167.2 -> 109.2 t/s). The documented MTP arm
(SPEC_TYPE=draft-mtp + UBATCH_SIZE=1024, 213.5 t/s) is recorded in the
env header rather than left to rediscovery.
Two bugs the trial caught: ${SPEC_PRESENCE_PENALTY:=0.0} was a
default-assignment, so the env value always won and the no-presence-penalty
MTP arm was unreachable (now ${VAR=0.0}); and the Q8_0 mmproj is the
publisher's requirement for concurrent image requests, which matters at
--parallel 3.
contextWindow is now 262144 -- the widest in the fleet -- so :7771 is the
compaction hub. 27B runbook re-banned RETIRED with its bench-window
section closed; indexes, homepage card, OpenWebUI doc and the worklog
re-keyed.
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.
The full-suite re-run after the reset fix came back "1 flaky": 12-crawl reached
plex.franksdank.cloud, the guard cleared, and Plex Web — signed out in the
qa-e2e profile — handed the browser to its own hosted sign-in surface, so the
hostname never settled on the vhost (60 s poll, Expected plex.franksdank.cloud /
Received app.plex.tv). settleThroughGuard now takes a HANDOFFS landing list per
vhost; only plex.franksdank.cloud gets one, every other host still has to land on
its own vhost, and the guard assertions (Anubis cleared, no authentik uidField,
status < 500) are unchanged. Worklog and E2E gotcha 6 carry both symptoms: the
ERR_ABORTED reset and the hand-off.
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).
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.
- production boot reproduced the census (22,664/1,461, fit 21,439 leaving
2,119 >= 1,872, KV 13,328.00 MiB at n_ctx_seq 200,704, n_slots 2), live
probes green (pong + reasoning_content, tool_calls, 512px -> Red, 75.8 t/s),
e2e 33/33
- records the two live-path stragglers the swap had to catch: the serve
script's retired-payload DEFAULTS and the OpenWebUI model row description
(live DB state, re-keyed with a backup, no forced restart)
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 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.
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