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- Historical references to the OLD frank-small (FreeToken/CUDA on the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 writer's 31b1ec3 added LLM/frank-large-flash-server-v2-swift15.md
but did not wiki-link it from index.md, which failed the docs-index
seam (test 135). Add the link as the new ACTIVE frank-large runbook
(supersedes halogen 0.1.4).
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.
The parallel session's uncommitted swap, committed at Frank's direction
(commit whatever's in the working tree):
- llama.cpp master on the RTX 3090 now serves ukisai's
Swift-1.5-Qwen3.8-27B GSQ-RCO IQ3_S WITH the in-file MTP head, ONE
131,072-token slot at Frank's 128k cap, q8_0 K + q8_0 V, vision through
the base-model projector; MiMo-V2.6 Q6_K (2x200704 f16 KV) retired to
rollback target.
- env/serve/download + seam twins updated together (deployer payload gates
rode the previous commit's deploy-remote.sh).
- docs: new swift15 runbook; MiMo Q6K runbook retired; AGENTS.md topology
and both vault indexes follow (root index ACTIVE/RETIRED flip, test 135
seam green).
- comfyui: two qwen-image t2i workflow drops under dankclaw/comfyui/
workflows/ (12 KiB).
The parallel session's stash pop left GGUF Compatibility, Multi-Device
Splits, Serving Sizing, PCIe Link and Atomics, RDNA4 Container Serving,
vLLM Porting triage and RDNA4 MoE Budget unindexed and carrying 9
unresolved wikilinks (LLM Bench Windows / Model Swap / AGENTS targets
that never existed, a [[nodiscard]] C++ attribute parsed as a wiki link,
and two multi-line-wrapped link tokens). All repointed to real pages;
six rows added to the vault index; seam green.
Both indexes stated the pre-doubling VRAM as current. Now 2,279 MiB free with
the 4096/2048 pair named, so no index contradicts the runbook it links to.
- new active runbook frank-small-llama-mimo-q6k-2x200704.md: 21,276 used /
2,849 true free (inside the 2-3 GiB floor), decode 94.44 t/s vs 104.84 on
Q5_K_M - the rung costs a measured -10 % (weight-bandwidth-bound card),
512px red-PNG vision verified, and the new probe-size law (>=256 px: a
10x10 image undersupplies image tokens and the model answers 'video'),
nvidia-smi free-field law (driver holds ~450 MiB the subtraction hides)
- frank-small-llama-mimo-q5km.md retired; it keeps the boot-pair table and
becomes the Q5 rollback reference (3,571 free, 104.84 t/s measured)
- AGENTS.md fleet row, endpoint section, --parallel lesson, runbook index
(active row + two retired rows); LLM + root index entries
- Q6_K GGUF-vs-GGUF diff proven: template and all 46 KV keys byte-identical
to Q5_K_M - the vision probe scare was probe size, not payload
- new active runbook frank-large-rocmfpx-q6agent-uncensored-mtp.md: the
Q6_0_ROCMFPX_AGENT file (ftype 114, 339 type-102 + 159 type-103 tensors),
27.6-28.1 t/s at 86.8% draft acceptance, the measured ngram-mod chain
rejection (-15% prose: recurrent-state rollback disabled), the
bench-window hardening laws
- frank-large-rocmfpx-q8agent-mtp.md retired; rollback section corrected
(gufo payloads removed from disk 2026-10-03 - that rollback is now a
re-download; the aligned Q8 file is the direct one, still on disk)
- frank-small-llama-mimo-q5km.md reshaped to 2 x 200704 with fully
unquantized f16 KV: boot-pair table gains the measured row (20,530 used /
4,046 free), 104.84 tok/s, slot-window contract at 200704, rollback to
the 3x180224 + q8_0-V shape documented
- AGENTS.md: fleet table rows, both endpoint sections, the chain law
extended with the recurrent-model measurement, the --parallel law with
the reslice, runbook index (active + retired)
- LLM/index.md + root index entries updated
Runbook, both indexes, AGENTS.md (topology row, endpoint section, three new
Key Lessons, one stale SGLang label in the bench list) and the bundle log now
describe the deployed shape: pool 540,672, 180,224 tokens per conversation,
f16 K + q8_0 V, mmproj vision, 21,684 used / 2,441 free of 24,576 MiB, 106.8
tok/s decode, 3,814 t/s prefill.
The claims that mattered:
- three contexts buy 180,224 tokens per conversation, not the native 262,144,
and a longer prompt is a hard 400 - so models.yml contextWindow is 180224
and frank-primary's 183,501-token compaction request no longer fits here
(forward pointer added to the retired SGLang runbook, which asserted it)
- the vision tower bills ~1.4 GiB for a 918 MB file, established by subtracting
two measured boots, not by a formula
- /v1/chat/completions ignores the legacy top-level 'images' field: the model
invents a color; only the image_url content part reaches it
frank-large: new runbook frank-large-rocmfpx-q8agent-mtp.md — the ftype-115
tensor-type lock-in that forced the fork, the pinned build (set_rows history),
the measured MTP A/B (17.0 vs 7.6 t/s decode, acceptance 0.462), the live
client contract (reasoning_content, effort fold, vision restored) and rollback.
frank-small: new runbook frank-small-llama-mimo-q5km.md; q6k marked retired
(rollback target). gufo runbook marked retired (rollback target). Both indexes,
the fleet topology table, the vision/models.yml notes, the benchmarking law and
three new Key Lessons updated.
The first crash-looping boot (51 restarts): serve received the host path
/home/dank/models/... but the models tree is mounted at /models inside the
container, so transformers failed 'Repo id must be in the form
namespace/repo_name' before the engine even built. Same conversion the spec
draft already used. Pinned by bats. Root docs index links the new runbook
(seam required it) and the work log records the crash-loop plus the 52 G
payload reclaim.
Replaces llama.cpp Gemma4-12B-QAT (payload + binary retained as rollback).
SGLang in a self-contained python3.12 venv with an extracted CUDA 13.0
nvcc toolchain for the sgl-kernel/flashinfer JIT.
Shape: fp8 KV, pinned 606,208-token pool / 4 x 151,552 slots, bf16 mamba
states pinned at 32 slots (the engine autofills the ssm pool to a fixed
~5.1 GB regardless of dtype), eager prefill (no headroom for graph
capture), no spec decode (the checkpoint ships no mtp.* tensors despite
mtp_num_hidden_layers=1 — NEXTN drafts with an uninitialised 4.24 GiB
ghost at 0% acceptance).
Verified: 83.9 tok/s decode, 170k single prompt, 4 concurrent 54k
requests, vision (in-checkpoint tower), reasoning_content field.
Payload: Intel/GLM-5.3-Flash-W4A16-AutoRound (AutoRound symmetric int4 group
128, auto_round:auto_gptq, 34 shards + 2 extras, 113,074 tensors, ~170 GiB).
It is the only W4A16 checkpoint this fork can serve with expert offload: its
quant_method "auto-round" is overridden to "inc", which routes the MoE to
libr4d's grouped W4A16 GEMM (R4dW4a16MoEMethod). A compressed-tensors W4A16
build of the same model resolves to TritonWNA16Experts, which has no offload
recipe, and refuses to serve at all (170 GiB of experts cannot fit 64 GiB of
VRAM, so offload is mandatory).
Shape: tcclaviger RDNA4 vLLM fork (same digest-pinned image as the 2026-09-29
qwen cutover), TP=2, 131,072 ctx x 2 seqs, bf16 KV (fp8 is ILLEGAL here — it
disables the sparse MLA backend's rope-free Triton path, the only MLA decode
gfx12 has), util 0.98, NBATCH 2048, --enable-expert-offload
--expert-precise-memory, prefix caching, glm47 tool + reasoning parsers,
MTP and expert prefetch absent by measurement.
Measured: decode 9.9-10.0 tok/s, prefill 918 tok/s (warm), arena 14.51 GiB =
2,383 slots/rank over 12,096 host-backed experts (73.64 GiB pinned/rank).
THE 35 tok/s TARGET IS NOT MET and the shortfall is measured: live telemetry
(R4D_LRU_TELEMETRY=1) gives a 0.53-0.66 per-layer hit rate, a step moves
0.82 GiB of misses in ~100 ms = 8.2 GB/s effective against a link measured at
22.74 GB/s — the same structural gather-path gap the qwen campaign found.
Growing the arena 13.08 -> 14.51 GiB changed decode by nothing.
Rejected by measurement: MTP4 (head loads, acceptance 3.76-4.90, but decode
unchanged and prefill collapses 918 -> 255 — a verification forward gathers the
union of the batch's experts), NBATCH 8192 (identical prefill).
Also: scripts/patches/gpu_worker-kv-cap.patch (fork-local fix for a KV-reserve
model that under-counts GLM's per-sequence KDA state; not needed by this shape),
runbook, AGENTS.md row + section, both indexes, work log.
Rollback: 2339fae (qwen FP8 + MTP4).
gufo is a vertical inference engine built for exactly this hardware
(Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 / Radeon 8060S, gfx1151), and Dankclaw's frank-large
has swapped runtimes seven times in search of a better one. This one
ships no prebuilt Linux binary, so the runtime is BUILT FROM SOURCE on
the host and the payload, port, alias and client contract stay exactly
where they are.
Runtime: gufo v0.1.1 (b0f8673) at /home/dank/GitPackages/gufo-v0.1.1,
built by the new scripts/build-gufo.sh. It links the host ROCm 7.2.4
through its RPATH — the opposite of the unsloth prebuilt it replaces,
which carried its own — so two host workarounds are encoded in that
script: Ubuntu's librocwmma-dev installs a truncated rocWMMA header set
that shadows AMD's and cannot be overridden with -I in HIP mode, and the
ROCm clang prefers Ubuntu 26.04's GCC 16 headers over the GCC 15 whose
libstdc++ is actually installed.
Shape is unchanged: one session, full 262144 ctx, the same UD-Q8_K_XL
target and the same DFlash2 drafter, greedy, text-only. Speculation
moves from llama.cpp's fixed depth 4 to gufo's adaptive block policy
capped at 7 proposals.
Client-contract deltas, all documented: the chat template is compiled
into the binary (no --chat-template-file, so the Qwen-Sharp 73k-token
failure mode is gone), reasoning_effort now takes the full OpenAI set
(so models.yml's reasoningEffortMap fold is no longer required — kept
anyway, so this commit does not also move every high role from xhigh to
high effort), and there is no KV-quant or prompt-cache-RAM flag.
The test seam now runs the serve script against a stub engine and
asserts on the argv it actually execs, instead of grepping the script's
text. The deploy handler gates on the runtime binary and returns before
it stops the serving unit.
Measured trade, from gufo's own Q8_K_XL tables against llama.cpp
b11069: prefill +37% to +80%, cold load 4.5x faster, decode +7% at zero
depth — but -14% at 65,536 tokens of depth and -24% at 131,072. On the
8-bit target the crossover is ~32k, and frank-large runs one 262,144
conversation. The Q4_K_XL target shows no such regression.
Answers Frank's question: given the 2x R9700 box, which of DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash,
MiMo-V2.6-Flash-MOPD and GLM-5.3-Flash runs best, on what runtime, and can
Affinity / vllm-radiance / FreeToken-AMD be modified to run them fast.
Sizing, measured from the HF API rather than the model cards:
- DS4.1 payload 475.27 GiB, of which 189.13 GiB is Engram (two 94.56 GiB
shards, the layer 1 and 14 lookup tables). Lucebox never maps them, so
they do not evict the expert page cache.
- 240 routed experts x ~11 MB per token at the 37-of-384-per-layer residency
the hot stack can hold = ~2.4 GB across PCIe per token. At 55 GB/s real on
Gen5 x8 that is a ~23 tok/s ceiling, under the 35 tok/s goal before any
attention or dense work.
- The backend refuses layer-major prefill for V4.1, so the only legal
prefill is token-by-token; 1000 t/s is ~20x away.
Affinity (Codeberg StillDeadcode) builds clean here (hipcc 23, gfx1201, zero
errors) and claims 110 tok/s for the 284B V4-Flash, because the 101 GiB
container leaves the cold expert set in a pinned host pool in RAM. V4.1 is
2.5x too big to repeat that. Port scope, from both checkpoints' real
safetensors indices: expert machinery ports unchanged (identical tensor
naming, 15,360 tensors at 40x384), 26/32 per-layer tensors and 34/35 config
keys present. Five gaps - Engram, the disjoint {0,1,2} vs {0,4,128} ratio
vocabulary, CED, the DSpark draft geometry, vision. num_hash_layers is the
only key V4.1 lacks, so model.h:36's default of 3 silently survives and
would route layers 0-2 through a table that does not exist.
Also corrects: Dankserver RAM 60 -> 246 GiB (stale since the 2026-09-20 board
swap) and storage; the top-level index credited V4.1 with V4's geometry
(43 layers / 256 experts vs the actual 40 / 384).
New ACTIVE runbook (setup/doctor PASS=34/FAIL=0, UVA transport verified
in serving workers, wire-verified alias/reasoning/metrics), index +
vault entries flipped: llama.cpp b11030 endpoint RETIRED 2026-09-27 to
rollback target. Topology diagram updated.
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.
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.
Knowledge-base follow-up to a45f396. The runbook, both index one-liners, and
the AGENTS.md topology row all still declared FP8 active; flipped to
just1moremodel/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-MXFP4-awq with unquantized bf16 KV (pool
486,464 tokens, full 262,144 window), and recorded the causal nuance: fp8 KV
was on both arms, so the FP8-vs-MXFP4 gap was weight precision, not KV - clean
KV is a quality hypothesis for W4A8, not a throughput one. No verdict yet.
The quadlet's "TEXT ONLY ... 400 here" comment was wrong: vision works on the
MXFP4 checkpoint (Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration carries the vision tower
through the Gemma4 merge path, unquantized) - verified by naming a solid red
48x48 PNG "Red". Comment corrected; harness models.yml input stays [text,image].
Docs-only; no re-deploy (the endpoint already serves vision).
New runbook frank-large-unsloth-qwen38-flash-next.md (runtime, payload,
deployed config, the explicit -md, the 114 GiB GTT memory model, client
contract, rollback). frank-large-ciru-orca.md marked RETIRED (rollback
target, payload and runtime intact on disk). AGENTS.md topology row,
frank-large section, harness note, runbook index, and the GPU-budget
lesson (GTT aperture ~114 GiB, not the stale 64 GiB rocm-smi figure —
the CIRU Orca held 92.6 GiB on the same device). LLM index header,
mermaid, active list, and the vault root index updated. Work-log entry.
The radiance TP=2 cutover changed the metric namespace frank-medium exports
(llamacpp:* -> vllm:*) and left two scrape targets addressing host processes
by an address a container cannot reach.
- shared/prometheus/rules/llm-fleet.yml: two namespaces side by side. Added
LlmRequestsWaiting, LlmKvCacheSaturated (vllm-only gauges llama.cpp never
had), the job:llm_vllm_prefix_cache_reuse:rate5m and
job:llm_spec_accept_length:rate5m recording rules, and re-cut
LlmPrefixCacheCollapse / LlmSpecDecodeOff to OR both families with
per-family traffic floors so an idle endpoint cannot fire them. Every
expression validated against live Prometheus.
- shared/prometheus/prometheus.yml: frank-small -> host.containers.internal:7771
and frank-large scraped at host.containers.internal:7770. Both are HOST
processes on Dankclaw and netavark DNATs published container ports only, so
the LAN-IP targets were red by construction; frank-large's CIRU llama.cpp
build does export the llamacpp:* family, contra the old comment.
- tests/observability_quadlet.bats: the two seams now encode the new contract
(per-endpoint reachability by process type; every named series must be on the
measured list for its engine; engine-independent rules must name both).
- homepage docs.html/services.json: frank-medium sees pictures, frank-large is
CIRU Orca with a single seat (was halogen w4b, two seats, 200k).
- docs: radiance runbook is ACTIVE (deployed flags, three-arm battery, verified
capabilities, rollback, replica-era sections labelled); llama.cpp runbook
carries the SUPERSEDED banner; Dual-R9700-Cooperation states the measured
verdict; Observability records the namespace split and the DNAT lesson;
AGENTS.md topology/frank-medium/Model Config/Benchmarking Policy/runbook
index flipped; both indexes updated; work-log entry added.
Also repaired agent-pass damage: prose prepended above frontmatter openers,
duplicated runbook bodies, a literal tool-call token pasted into a runbook, and
an index destroyed by diff artifacts (restored from HEAD, flips re-applied).
Vault link check: 128 pages, 0 unresolved. ./tests/run.sh: 325 pass.
Reanalysis after the 2026-09-20 swap to an ASUS ProArt B850-Creator WiFi
NEO: both R9700s now sit on CPU GPP root ports (x8/x8 Gen5 bifurcation),
every bridge reads AtomicOpsCap Routing+, and both endpoints read
AtomicOpsCtl ReqEn+ (CAP_EXP+28.w = 0x1440) — the exact precondition
Dual-R9700-Cooperation's test plan named. TP=2 is therefore unblocked,
not proven: no collective has been dispatched since the swap,
GGML_HIP_RCCL is still OFF, and the 272 t/s "tensor" number on record
measured a butterfly fallback.
- Dual-R9700-Cooperation: short answer rewritten, re-measured 2026-09-20
topology table, rebuild-hypothesis door marked moot, probe plan is now
standing work.
- Dankserver System Specs: Motherboard section; GPU BDFs 0b:00.0 ->
07:00.0, iGPU 10:00.0 -> 11:00.0, kernel 7.0.0-31, SMT on, and the new
eno2 (192.168.0.247) second 5GbE port holding the low-metric default
route while eno1 keeps the fleet's static .235.
- frank-medium-llamacpp-dflash2: rationale and hardware row split past
from present; dated work-log sections stay as history.
- AGENTS.md + both indexes: no longer assert a wall that no longer exists.
Docs only; frank-medium stayed active and healthy throughout (verified
/health). ./tests/run.sh 331/331.
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.
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
AGENTS.md topology, Active Services, the CUDA-quant-KV lesson (f16 is no
longer why), and the runbook index. New frank-small-gemma4-12b runbook:
payload digests, the SWA/q8 arithmetic behind --fit's 262k window, the
MTP-sidecar + ngram-mod chain, the always-accepted reasoning_effort, and
the fit-probe error that looks like a fault at boot. The Qwen runbook and
both indexes carry the retirement; work log updated.
New page [[frank-medium-batch-ubatch]]: the sweep's method (one invocation per
cell, a VRAM sampler per cell, 64k prefill measured AT 64k depth), the full
batch x ubatch matrix, the depth-0 control, the deployed-shape VRAM table, and
the limitations — including the one that cost me two runs, that amdgpu does not
return ~26 GiB at once, so a reload after a kill fails with "unable to allocate
ROCm0 buffer" and reads exactly like a configuration that does not fit.
AGENTS.md: the batch lesson now carries the measured curve (the peak at 512, the
10 % loss at 2048, the irrelevant logical batch, the invariant decode) instead
of the "~3.3 vs ~1.7 GiB" figure, which was measured at the bench's shape; at
the deployed shape the asymmetry is 2.41 against 1.30. Fleet row and the
frank-medium section now say 35:30 and batch 6144x512.
Runbook: deployed flags, the split history with the ubatch-512 table, the fault
note, and the verified VRAM (6.44 / 6.90 idle, 6.23 / 6.64 under two concurrent
requests).
Dual-R9700-Cooperation: the live capability table (card 0 ReqEn+ against card 1
ReqEn-, x1 effective link on card 1) and an honest label on the M.2_2 riser
premise — it is ASUS's spec sheet, not a measurement, and CPU-attached does not
imply Routing+ on this board (00:08.3 is CPU-side and Routing-).
log.md: the round trip recorded, newest first.
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 runbook for the new deployment, plus the sweep of everything that still
described the vllm-radiance replica pair: the vault index and its ACTIVE
marker, the superseded banner on the radiance page, the pointer from the
ROCmFPX page, the homepage card, the Grafana dashboard description and the
observability page's scrape table.
The new page carries the two facts a future agent needs and the flags do not
say: llama.cpp's layer split is what lets BOTH cards serve ONE model without
any collective (vLLM's PP handoff is an RCCL send/recv, which is the primitive
this host cannot dispatch), and the rocBLAS Tensile-path trap that makes a
healthy-looking build fail on the first request.
New page: LLM/Dual-R9700-Cooperation.md — registered in the vault index, with
the measured evidence rather than the theory.
**The answer.** Card #2 sits behind the B650 chipset, whose bridges advertise
`AtomicOpsCap: Routing-` (read-only), so ROCr refuses to fill the hostcall
buffer RCCL's kernels declare and no RCCL op can dispatch on it. Two paths fix
it: an M.2→PCIe x4 riser into the free, CPU-attached M.2_2 slot (~$30; per
ASUS's spec page M.2_1 and M.2_2 are CPU-attached, PCIEX16_2 is chipset in x1
mode, and there is no x8/x8 bifurcation on this board), or a board whose CPU x16
bifurcates to x8/x8. Bandwidth is not the constraint: ≈10 MB per token-step ≈
1.4 ms at Gen4 x4.
**New measured results.** A bare 2-rank torch.distributed run: rank 0 (CPU-lane
card) passes broadcast/all_reduce/barrier; rank 1 (chipset card) fails all
three, and `send`/`recv` fails too — which kills pipeline parallelism as an
escape, since vLLM's PP handoff is exactly that primitive.
**Correction.** I previously said no software path exists. That overshot. One is
open and unverified: recompiling RCCL so its kernels stop declaring a hostcall
buffer (`-mprintf-kind=buffered` is the claim). Counter-evidence recorded: RCCL's
device source contains no live printf/assert/__assertfail, so the trigger is
unexplained, and the claim traces to search summaries, not a primary source. The
page carries the two-command test that would settle it. Also corrected: 0.9.3 is
radiance's version, not vLLM's — the base is vLLM 0.27.1 / torch 2.11.0 / ROCm
7.14, and its shipped RCCL exposes no `ncclDevComm*`, so torch's symmetric-memory
path cannot run.
**Rule added to the benchmarking policy**: it covers ANY GPU experiment, not just
benchmarks — including a bare 2-rank probe. Running one against the live service
on 2026-09-16 preceded the host going hard down (no ARP, no ICMP, power cycle
required); a hung AQL dispatch wedging the driver is the plausible mechanism.
The policy also now says how to tell off from wedged: `ip neigh` from a peer.
Retiring dankclaw/compose.yaml and adding alert rules invalidated claims across
the repo, including in the rule file agents read first. Clean cutover includes
the prose.
**Tests that had gone hollow.** Four assertions grepped dankclaw/compose.yaml
for a service name. With the file gone they passed by *absence* — a gate that
can no longer fail. Each now asserts the real invariant ("no dankclaw compose
file competes with the quadlet units") and keeps a live check for a re-added
entry, so it still fails when one appears: verified by recreating a compose file
with a comfyui service and watching three tests go red, then removing it.
**AGENTS.md, which was wrong about ComfyUI.** It said ComfyUI runs CPU-only
("no ROCm wheels for gfx1151, CUDA images wrong"). That was true in the
compose era and is false now: the restored unit runs with /dev/kfd + /dev/dri and
must NOT pass --cpu. An agent trusting the rule file would have re-broken it.
Also corrected: the observability paragraph ("RUNNING BUT UNCONFIGURED, no
datasource, no rules" — all three have been configured since 2026-09-16), the
Active runbook row that still named halogen for frank-large, halogen's absence
from the Retired table, the benchmark policy naming halogen's harness, and the
seam list.
**Unit and page claims.** prometheus.container said "no alerting rules anywhere
in this stack"; node-exporter.container said Dankserver runs from its compose
stack; Prometheus.md documented three jobs as working (they scrape HTML: they
can never report up) and said no dashboard existed; index.md and the three
authentik service pages pointed at the retired file; Authentik.md's upgrade
instruction told you to bump an image tag in it.
One bad edit of my own on the way (a stale line number clobbered a See Also
entry in Prometheus.md) — caught by reading back, fixed, and the vault link
checker now proves the cross-references hold.
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)
Frank
