Asked whether Vulkan on both devices unlocks the split. It does not: the
per-tensor design aborts byte-identically, because the gate is not the driver
mix but `--override-tensor` — `has_tensor_overrides()` is a required term of
the scheduler's `pipeline_parallel` flag (llama-context.cpp:433, the only place
in the tree that reads it), and that flag sets `n_copies` in
`ggml_backend_sched_new`. With `n_copies == 1` a pre-allocated weight on a
non-primary device has no backend and the graph aborts.
Chasing it exposed a harness artifact that invalidated the earlier conclusion:
llama-bench splits a device LIST with `/` and SWEEP values with `,`, so
`-dev CUDA0,Vulkan1` was two single-device runs all along (and `-ts 0.85,0.15`
two sweep values, i.e. device 0 takes everything — which is where the bogus OOM
came from). With the correct syntax two-device splits work in both flavours:
pure Vulkan -dev Vulkan1/Vulkan0 -ts 0.85/0.15 -> 27.55 tok/s @64k (12.8 GiB on the 3090)
cross-vendor -dev CUDA0/Vulkan1 -ts 0.15/0.85 -> 27.23 tok/s @64k, pp512 268.5 (15.0 GiB)
iGPU alone 25.77 tok/s @64k, pp512 231.8
+7 % decode, +16 % prefill — real but not a regime change, and it costs the
3090 ~15 GiB, which this fleet spends on its only vision endpoint. The design's
premise still fails: whole layers carry their experts (1.62 GiB each), the 12
attention layers are spread every 4th, and the 32.8 GiB PLE must stay on the
main device, so KV cannot be consolidated on the 3090.
Also records the evening's incident (a dead rootless podman pause process took
all container management down; `podman system migrate` panics in 5.7.0; reboot
repaired it) and the netavark host-address lesson from the hermes 502.
The design we sketched (trunk + KV on the 3090, MoE experts on the iGPU) is not
expressible in mainline llama.cpp. Per-tensor cross-backend placement aborts in
the scheduler -- "pre-allocated tensor (blk.0.ffn_down_exps.weight) in a buffer
(Vulkan1) that cannot run the operation (NONE)" -- and both per-layer
cross-backend forms fail at load. CUDA + Vulkan cannot serve one model; the CPU
is the only fallback side that works, which is exactly why -ot exps=CPU runs.
What the same build does instead is the surprise: iGPU-only (Vulkan/RADV, PLE in
page cache) gives 32.64 tok/s shallow, 25.77 tok/s at 64k depth and 456.7 tok/s
prefill, with the 3090 idle at 0 %. That matches halogen's deployed ~25 tok/s --
but commits 116 of the host's 121 GiB against halogen's 95.4 held with 14.7
spare, so it is not deployable beside the co-tenants. Throughput parity, memory
bankruptcy: the fleet's two-endpoint split stands, now on evidence rather than
preference.
New page LLM/x4-pair-experiment.md carries the tensor inventory, the results
table, the two scheduler limits, reproduction commands, and the traps found on
the way. Both index pages also stop calling halogen retired -- the ik swap's
stale claims were still sitting in them.
The LLM index still opened with vllm-radiance as frank-medium's runtime and
drew the replica pair in its topology diagram; the cooperation page's thesis
(collectives are impossible, so the answer is hardware) now has to name the
path the fleet actually took: llama.cpp's layer split, which launches no RCCL
kernel on either card. That reframes the M.2 riser as a means to TENSOR
parallelism rather than a means to using both cards at all.
halogen-flash-server is ACTIVE again with its 2026-09-16 measured ledger (budget
33.5 GiB against a need of 27.2 — no clamp — and 14.7 GiB left for everything
else), ik_llama.cpp is retired with its measurements kept as the record of why,
and the new frank-small runbook covers the -mtp file, the 64 KiB/token KV
arithmetic, the MTP contract, and the reasoning_effort trap that cost me every
subagent on the endpoint.
AGENTS.md: topology, Active Services, runbook index, and three new llama.cpp
lessons (MTP is a property of the file; --jinja is what `tools` needs; a model's
template can reject the harness's thinking level). Three pre-existing defects
found while editing it: a truncated sentence mid-file, a harness path that does
not exist on either server, and the benchmarking stop/mask recipe still calling
frank-large a root unit.
Truthfulness notes worth keeping: the co-tenant stall NOTE prints again, so the
claim that it "no longer prints" is gone and the three observed block counts are
recorded instead of a guessed threshold; and the Observability page says out
loud why frank-large has no scrape job rather than leaving a silent absence.
The radiance MXFP4 stack cannot run TP=2 on this host. RCCL's collective
kernels carry a hidden hostcall-buffer parameter, and ROCr refuses to
dispatch them on a device without PCIe atomics: the AQL dispatch fails with
hipErrorIllegalState ("the operation cannot be performed in the present
state"), which is what every two-rank collective hit. The second R9700 sits
behind the chipset bridges 05:00.0/06:09.0, which advertise
`AtomicOpsCap: Routing-` — a read-only capability, so no software can enable
atomic routing on that path and the driver's
pci_enable_atomic_ops_to_root() fails for that card. The first card, on CPU
root port 00:01.1, has atomics enabled.
Ruled out: kernel version (7.0.0-28/-30/-31 identical, after a full upgrade),
iommu=pt, P2P hardware (45.3 GB/s between the cards), the shipped librccl (a
from-source rebuild reproduces the failure at the same call path), vLLM and
pynccl (a bare two-rank torch.distributed allreduce fails the same way), all
NCCL transport knobs, and single-rank tests (NCCL short-circuits at
world_size=1, so one-card success proves nothing).
Deployment: three rootless Quadlets — frank-medium-a (:7771, card 1),
frank-medium-b (:7772, card 2), both TP=1 at 114688 context (262144 and
131072 do not fit one card's KV) with vLLM-profiled KV — and
frank-medium-proxy (:7770), a round-robin that preserves the fleet contract
of one endpoint and one served model name. frank-medium.container stays as
the TP=2 target for a host whose second card is atomic-capable; the deploy
handler does not install it and trashes any stale copy.
Measured through the proxy (vllm bench serve, random dataset, --ignore-eos):
conc 1 42.8 tok/s, conc 4 147.6 tok/s, conc 8 230.8 tok/s, 32k prefill at
~2.8k tok/s per card, TPOT p50 23.6-28.8 ms.
Also: healthcheck reads PORT so one probe serves all three units, the hermes
example and the harness models.yml drop to the real 114688 context, and the
runbook records the full evidence chain.
- Runbook with the measured envelope (prefill ~192 t/s at the VNNI ceiling;
decode ~3.8-4.3 t/s gated by 100 backend splits/token, GPU 95% idle), the
root-cause evidence chain, tuning levers, and co-tenancy traps
- AGENTS.md: fleet topology row + Active Services section for the ik
deployment; halogen demoted to rollback; bench policy unit type fixed
- LLM + root indexes relinked (frank-large-ik-uncensored ACTIVE,
halogen-flash-server retired)
New runbook page serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-medium-rocmfpx.md records
the hardware swap, the self-contained gfx1201 build, the measured layer-vs-
tensor decision (llama-bench multi-device syntax gotcha included), the
tensor-mode draft abort, served-path numbers, and the post-cleanup host ROCm
posture. AGENTS.md, README, docs indexes, Dankserver System Specs,
deployment/Hermes/OpenWebUI/Plex/Stack pages follow the rename;
freetoken-frank-small is marked RETIRED and kingjones-q8agent SUPERSEDED.
Work log entry added.
frank-large moves from the kingjones30/ROCmFPX llama.cpp build to
peonist-ai/halogen-flash-server 0.5.8 serving Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (w4b
.hgn 115.55 GiB + quality overlay). Upstream measures this engine at
roughly 4x the prefill throughput of the llama.cpp family on the same
gfx1151 silicon, and prefill dominates any prompt with real context.
Shape: a rootless Quadlet container (dankclaw/frank-large/quadlet/),
engine on container loopback :8730 (never published), OpenAI front-end
:8731 published as host 7770, HALOGEN_MODEL_ID=frank-large so no client
renamed anything. Context 262144, KV pool 262144 positions (~7.2 GiB,
conservative for a shared 121 GiB host), 4 slots, host reserve 24,
vision tower on, weights pinned, all other flags at vendor defaults.
Weights are fetched by HALOGEN_DOWNLOAD on first start into a writable
/home/dank/models/halogen.
The llama.cpp era (unit, env, serve script) is staged in .AGENTTRASH/
rather than deleted; the STRIX payload and the ROCmFPX build stay on
disk as the rollback target. deploy_llm_large becomes a user-quadlet
handler: it retires the old ROOT unit (moving its checkout symlink into
the home trash, never rm) and gates the first start on the download
rather than reporting a failure for a fetch that is working exactly as
designed.
frank-npu is retired in the same change. The kernel cmdline moves from
iommu=pt to amd_iommu=off for the 13-16% of prefill upstream measured,
and that takes the XDNA2 NPU with it: without PASID/SVA the driver
cannot open /dev/accel/accel0 (err=-19). Its five dependent routes are
repointed (Hermes vision -> frank-large, Hermes title generation ->
frank-small, harness vision -> frank-large, tiny -> frank-small, task ->
frank-large:medium) and its provider blocks are removed from both the
harness config and Hermes's live config. Audio input leaves the fleet
with no replacement; image input survives on halogen's vision tower.
Docs: new halogen-flash-server runbook, new IOMMU decision record, and
frank-npu rewritten as a retirement record. AGENTS.md topology, runtime
sections, benchmarking policy (frank-large is a user unit now) and the
harness model-config section are corrected.
Mechanical identity rename across the knowledge base, AGENTS.md, README, the
hermes config example, and homepage services.json. No behavior change; served
aliases on the LLM endpoints change with the deploy of commit 69f87c8.
Env file is the source of truth (unit ExecStart runs the serve script which
sources it); serve-script default and the deployer health-gate URL flipped in
lockstep so the post-restart health gate polls the new port. Docs, fleet table,
and both index bullets updated to match.
frank-default-sightsound (FLM v1.0.1, XDNA2 NPU, port 52626) is live on
Dankclaw. Documents the first-deploy crash-loop root cause: iommu=off on the
kernel cmdline breaks the XDNA2 SVA bind (amdxdna_drm_open ret -19), so every
/dev/accel/accel0 open fails with ENODEV; fixed with iommu=pt + reboot.
Whole-registry single-port serving with per-request routing by exact FLM tag;
unknown tags fall back to llama3.2:1b (no 404). Health = GET /v1/version.
Vision + audio towers proven live (image_url color probe; audio control-pair
token-count probe). Updates AGENTS.md fleet table + runtime section, both
index pages, and the change log.
- kingjones-strix-rocmfp4 reactivated as the ACTIVE large runbook:
runtime build recipe (WEBUI=OFF gotcha), deployed serving profile,
fa-on-works-unpatched evidence, MTP heads documented unloadable,
swap procedure + 2026-08-30 validation record
- agentionai-fast-imatrix marked RETIRED (rollback record kept)
- freetoken-frank-default-small: model/lineage/template sections now
Huihui abliterated FP8; new operational quirk: chat API 422 without
explicit model field
- LLM index + AGENTS fleet table/runtime sections current; both
services' history chains fixed (small was still Tiel in AGENTS.md)
- worklog entry added; models.json contextWindow for large corrected
to the real per-slot 131072 (llama clamps n_ctx_train/parallel)
Model: agentionai/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-ROCmFP4-FAST-imatrix-GGUF (87.06 GiB,
Q4_0_ROCMFP4_FAST imatrix-calibrated, per-head PLE table inside the GGUF —
fully VRAM-resident). Draft: agentionai/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-MTP-ROCmFP4-FAST
(2.28 GiB, matched ROCmFP4-FAST quant, ~66% acceptance at n-max 3).
Vision tower (f16) loaded via mmproj/.
Runtime: charlie12345/ROCmFPX build-qwen38 (HIP, ROCm 7.2.4, gfx1151) —
the only binary with the ROCmFP4 FAST types. Replaces the jcbtc CIRU v1.1
deployment (ciru-ai runtime).
Profile: card sampling table (temp 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20, min_p 0.0,
presence 1.5) mixed with the validated build-qwen38 serving profile:
262144 ctx x 1 slot, b 4096 / ub 4096, t 16 / tb 16, f16 KV, fa on,
cont-batching, prompt cache + 8 GiB cache-ram + idle slots, 16 ctx
checkpoints (no --checkpoint-min-step — unsupported on this binary),
--fit off (auto-fit segfaults on qwen4exp hyper-connection config),
--spec-type draft-mtp,ngram-mod with n-max 3 (adaptive p-split measured
worse per author card), p-min 0.75. Qwen-Sharp chat template kept;
reasoning stays in DeepSeek format.
The 2026-08-28 failure of this draft head on the kingjones STRIX_LEAN
model was a cross-vendor pairing problem: the head carries
blk.48.hc_attn_norm.weight (verified in-GGUF, same shape as the working
CIRU draft). Docs: new runbook agentionai-fast-imatrix, index updates.
All in-repo path references (AGENTS.md, README, old scripts, report artifacts,
test code paths) rewritten in the same commit; focused-test map extended for
.gitignore, old/scripts/*, dankclaw/comfyui/*, and report/* per this repo's
own convention ('add one before committing'). Obsidian wikilinks are
title-based and unaffected.
Frank