The calibration mode kept a private step (8 seats at MNBT 65,536) that it
called "free throughput". The step's activation arena is billed to the card,
so the wide step cost the container its own expert slab and KV: at 65,536
the arena is 10.65 GiB and the claim falls to 16.85 GiB (weights 14.24 GiB
in VRAM, 56.24 GiB stranded on disk, KV 271 MiB for 8 seats), and the boot
dies with "startup stopped: out of memory" (measured 2026-10-29, while the
kldref boot at MNBT 1,024 — arena 504 MiB, claimable 30.87 GiB — had just
recorded for 16 hours without fault).
Every mode now takes its seat count from FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_SEQS, the file that
owns it, exactly as PR #77 established for the card split, and its step from
FRANK_QWEN38_MNBT. The per-mode literals in kldref and score follow, so one
number defines the geometry for all three. The test that pinned the old
exemption is re-pinned to the invariant that replaced it.
tests/run.sh: 576/576 green.
run-qwen38-bf16.sh carried its own --host-pool-mib 12288 / --gpu-headroom-mib 768,
copied from the w4-era swift15 rig. The engine derives the whole per-card split from
those two numbers, and the KV cache's funding is `elastic - expert_floor` where the
expert floor is a function of the pinned host pool — so the pool buys cache as well
as residency. The first kldref boot got a 270 MiB / 7,436-position pool and the
recorder refused all 197 corpus documents ("document 0 is 10554 tokens and the KV
pool holds 7436"), exiting 1.
The rig now sources FRANK_ARCHON_HOST_POOL_MIB / FRANK_ARCHON_GPU_HEADROOM_MIB from
scripts/frank-archon.env, the file that owns them (49152 / 96), with `:?` guards, and
the header records the law instead of the claim that the pool never touches logits.
tests/qwen38_reference.bats pins the shape verbatim, so its SHAPE contract moves with
it; the suite is green (558 tests).
Two tools the KLD gate depends on.
build-qwen38-bf16-rad.sh converts the checkpoint to a BF16 .rad with NO recipe
line, so every tensor stays bf16 - the reference must not carry the quantization
it is there to measure. It gates before writing 335 GiB: the checkpoint present
and fully verified by the fetcher's own verifier, the peak-disk bill (350,000
MiB: the checkpoint's 343,323 plus margin, because the .rad is built beside it),
an existing output retired to ~/.AGENTTRASH by --force instead of deleted, and
--plan-only before the real convert. --max-ctx 32768 is a declare-time check, not
a weight change: dropped, the resolver is handed the checkpoint's 262,144 window,
which at fp8 cache is 258.8 GiB on a 192 GiB machine.
run-qwen38-bf16.sh serves that container in three modes - kldref (record the
reference logits), score (record an arm's logits against that reference), calib
(open the Gram tap for the imatrix). It drains frank-archon and restores it on
every exit path, and the two logits modes ride ONE step size
(FRANK_QWEN38_MNBT, default 2048) and ONE window (FRANK_QWEN38_MAX_MODEL_LEN,
default 32768) so a reference and an arm cannot be measured at different shapes:
that is the whole validity of the KL number. Four slots over 2,048 matches
frank-archon.env's operating point (MAX_SEQS=4, MAX_BATCHED_TOKENS=2048); the
smaller host pool (12,288 vs 49,152) buys residency, which moves speed, not
logits. calib keeps 65,536 - decode-bound serving, never the gate.
kldref refuses before the drain when the corpus's longest record cannot fit the
declared window (limit = window x 3 chars, the pessimistic tokenizer bound; the
measured corpus is 38,263 chars, 2.6x inside 32,768). It runs on --dry-run too,
so the check is visible before a 20-minute drain is spent. 12 seam tests, each
red-proofed by neutralising the gate it pins.
Frank