The armed boot reached the engine and died in its own preflight:
halogen npu: /dev/accel/accel0 is here, but this process cannot open it
(crw-rw---- nobody:nogroup).
The node is root:render 0660 and a rootless container maps exactly one uid/gid,
so `render` is unmapped inside it and `--group-add keep-groups` — the vendor's
advice, and the ComfyUI pattern for /dev/kfd — cannot grant a group the
namespace does not map. Measured 2026-10-19 from a `dank` shell already in
`render`: without the flag denied, with the flag denied, with the udev mode
0666 the open succeeds (OPEN_OK). Same wall 99-comfyui-gpu-access.rules already
solved for the GPU compute nodes, so the accel node gets its counterpart:
dankclaw/udev/98-halogen-npu-access.rules — KERNEL=="accel[0-9]*",
SUBSYSTEM=="accel", MODE="0666"
The deployer installs the rule, reloads rules, re-triggers the node and only
then checks the mode; the serve script refuses any node that is not
other-writable, naming the rule, so this cannot return as a crash loop (189
restarts while chat was down is the failure mode being closed).
Both checks read the permission bit directly: `[ -o FILE ]` is not
"other-writable" — it means "exists" and `-o` doubles as the OR operator inside
test, which is why the first cut of the gate refused everything.
Dragoon seam: 33 -> 35 tests. The fixture node is 0666 like the installed one,
a 0660 node is refused with the rule named and nothing rendered, and the rule
file's shape plus the deployer's install/trigger are asserted.
The containment gate added in #44 parsed scripts/frank-dragoon.env through a
$CHECKOUT variable that does not exist in deploy-remote.sh, so the very next
deploy died at `set -u` before it touched the unit:
./scripts/deploy-remote.sh: line 1445: CHECKOUT: unbound variable
deploy-remote.sh runs from the checkout root and every other path in that block
is a parity-twin default (LLM_DRAGOON_CKPT/_VISION/_TOK_DIR), so the payload dir
gets the same treatment: LLM_DRAGOON_MODEL_DIR, defaulted to the deployed path,
compared directly. The seam now asserts that twin against the env file next to
the NPU twins it already checks, and the containment comparison itself is
verified both ways (inside accepted; the old outside path and a shared-prefix
sibling both refused).
frank-dragoon's lane section: the staging dir must live inside the payload dir
(the image ships no /models, so a nested :ro bind has no mountpoint to land on),
the entrypoint's rejection of HALOGEN_NPU_DIR, and the fabric-clock paragraph
corrected — the vendor's root host unit is installed and reports `held (manual)`
as of today, so "nothing is held" is retired along with the hand-write it
replaced.
dankclaw-iommu-translation-off: the deferred `pp_dpm_fclk` pin is no longer
deferred; the fact is owned by [[frank-dragoon]] and this page links it.
The lane's first boot died at container init, not at the engine:
runc create failed: ... create mountpoint for /models/npu mount:
mkdirat .../merged/models/npu: read-only file system
The image ships no /models, and the serve script binds the payload dir
there read-only, so a nested `-v $NPU_DIR:/models/npu:ro` had to create
its own mountpoint underneath a read-only parent — impossible. The
engine's own entrypoint confirms the container path is fixed: it rejects
HALOGEN_NPU_DIR outright ("our NPU models live under /models/npu/<id>/").
Fix is the mount shape, not the engine: FRANK_DRAGOON_NPU_DIR now lives
inside FRANK_DRAGOON_MODEL_DIR, so the payload's single read-only mount
puts the files at /models/npu/<id>/ by itself and the nested bind is
gone. Verified on the running container: after the move, `podman exec
frank-dragoon-halogen ls /models/npu/qwen3-embedding-0.6b` answers with
the staged tree while the lane is still armed off.
Both gates refuse the old shape by name (serve + deployer parity) so a
future payload swap that moves the model dir cannot reintroduce a crash
that lands after the deployer has already stopped the running unit.
The 2026-10-19 legs table blamed the frank-dragoon refusal on a root/rootless
netavark rule-set split. It is not that: the container is rootless (the root
unit's User=dank runs podman run), it is on pasta, and pasta installs no DNAT
for rootless-bridge traffic while refusing a second network outright. The
gateway alias does reach it (200) and is link-local, which is the same dead end
the Open Notebook URL guard hit. Measured with the move onto the bridge now in
the deployer, including the /proc/net/tcp line that shows 8730 is loopback-bound
and so stays private after the move.
Co-Authored-By: omp <omp@dankclaw>
An endpoint on podman's rootless default (pasta) has no address another
container can use, measured on 2026-10-19 from inside open-notebook:
- 192.168.0.143:7770 connection refused (pasta forwards the
published port in the host netns; no netavark
DNAT exists for traffic arriving from a
rootless bridge)
- host.containers.internal:7770 200, but the alias resolves to 169.254.1.2 —
link-local, which open-notebook's URL guard
refuses to store
- frank-dragoon-halogen:8731 name unknown: different netns
- --network pasta --network dankclaw_default
"cannot set multiple networks without bridge
network mode" — pasta cannot be added to
So reaching the NPU endpoints from an app container means moving the container
onto dankclaw_default (FRANK_DRAGOON_NETWORK; empty keeps today's shape). This
is not an exposure change: the engine's unauthenticated token port binds the
container's own loopback (/proc/net/tcp: 127.0.0.1:8730 against 0.0.0.0:8731),
so only the API port becomes name-resolvable — the same trust the published
7770 already carries on the LAN. The deployer refuses a network that does not
exist rather than starting a unit that restart-loops on it.
Co-Authored-By: omp <omp@dankclaw>
halogen-flash-server already ships an NPU path on the pin we run: for each
model named in HALOGEN_NPU_MODELS it loads the vendor's precompiled AIE
programs (XDNA2 executes only AIE-compiled graphs) and answers them on
/v1/embeddings inside the SAME container behind port 7770. That gives the
fleet an in-house embedding endpoint without touching the iGPU trunk.
The lane is opt-in and one line wide: HALOGEN_NPU_MODELS blank is the
pre-lane endpoint byte for byte (no device, no mounts, no engine env).
The three host preconditions the vendor names are gated in the serve script
and mirrored in the deployer (the 2026-10-01 twin law), each refused by name:
- the staged model files. /models is read-only and HALOGEN_DOWNLOAD stays
unset so the container opens no outbound connection at boot, so
scripts/download-frank-dragoon-npu.sh stages them from the pinned
revision with the catalog's own byte counts and sha256s (the engine
re-checks both at boot);
- the distro XRT's libxrt_coreutil/libxrt_core/libxrt_driver_xdna, each
mounted twice — where the image looks for XRT and at its own path —
because those libraries find each other where they were installed and
an /opt/xilinx/xrt of symlinks dangles inside the container;
- the GPU fabric clock HELD. On Strix Halo the iGPU and the NPU co-running
hang the machine (and corrupt NPU results) while FCLK changes speed, and
halogen refuses to start in that state; it cannot read host sysfs from
inside, so the hold is proven host-side. dankclaw/host/ carries the
vendor's halogen-fabric-clock{,.service} verbatim at tag v0.16.2 (sha256
a3a4f7f4e0142e71… / 5f9f1cc4c85a1c02…); the deployer installs, enables
and gates it only while the lane is named, and releases the clock plus
drops the boot hook when it is not.
After health, the deployer's lane gate is a real embedding through
/v1/embeddings — a 200 on /health proves nothing about the NPU programs.
Planner: dankclaw/host/halogen-fabric-clock* re-dispatches frank-dragoon
(the deployer installs it); dankclaw/host/grub and the fetch script plan
nothing.
Seam: 11 new tests — the off arm really renders nothing lane-specific, the
on arm renders the device/mounts/env, every missing precondition refuses by
name, the deployer twins and the host unit shape are pinned.
Co-Authored-By: omp <omp@dankclaw>
- frank-dragoon: measured the response_format contract. json_schema and json_object answer
schema-valid JSON at temperature 0 and draw a 400 at any sampled temperature, and because
the sampler default is server-side an absent temperature is sampled. The page claimed
"response_format is unsupported", which sends the next agent past a working feature.
- frank-dragoon: new "The NPU lane" section. The pinned 0.16.2 image already ships the
five-program AIE catalog including qwen3-embedding-0.6b, so /v1/embeddings is one env var
plus the accel device, the distro-XRT mount and the fabric-clock hold; embeddinggemma-2
needs 0.18.3+, the stock-kernel-driver memory-budget fix 0.18.8+. Host census recorded:
no /opt/xilinx/xrt, distro XRT 1:2.21.75 with libxrt_driver_xdna, clocks unheld.
- Open Notebook: scriptwriter probe verdict — greedy-only, and open-notebook's model record
is {credential, name, provider, type} with no per-row config, so it cannot ask for greedy;
frank-archon stays the writer. The embedding gap now has a named door instead of "build a
new llama.cpp slot".
- Frank TTS: "the NPU is not a door at all" was too broad. It is not a door for the TTS
family; halogen's precompiled catalog is a door on the same device.
- System Specs: NPU runtime row corrected to the distro XRT actually installed, and the
stale "frank-zealot serves 27B" line retired in favour of [[frank-zealot]] as sole owner.
Tests: ./tests/run.sh, 455 passed.
The page described an undeployed service whose scriptwriter was going to be
frank-zealot. Both halves are now false, and the reason is worth more than the
correction.
- Status, ports, coordinates: deployed 2026-10-19, guarded vhost, API published
on loopback only. The first episode is the proof: 747 s of speech in 301 s of
wall clock (2.5x real time, knobs at 1), download route 200 with the bearer
and 401 without.
- New section for the guard chain: provider-before-route, one upstream because
the image rewrites /api/* itself, and the API_URL law — autodetect appends
:5055, which is seerr's port on this host, so an unset API_URL yields a UI
that loads and an app that cannot call itself.
- Provisioned records table (credentials, model rows, dank-duo, dank-daily) and
the two contract traps measured on the live API: generate takes profile
NAMES, and the fleet has no /v1/embeddings, so every note save fails its
embed_note command while renders from content work fine.
- Why frank-archon writes the scripts: frank-zealot is reachable from this
netns only at 169.254.1.2, and open-notebook's URL guard refuses to store a
link-local base URL with no override. Census lands on [[Container Network
Namespaces]], which also gains the root-vs-rootless publish rule — a
root-published port is invisible to a rootless container, so "publish the
port" was the wrong remedy as written there.
- Frank TTS: the request's model field is ignored; only voice selects a pack.
Tests: ./tests/run.sh, 455 passed.
The service came up internal-only: UI on the LAN at 8502, API at 5056, both
published on every interface, with only its own shared password in front. That
put the episode library outside the fleet's auth chain and one port scan away
from anything on the network.
- Caddy: guarded vhost notebook.franksdank.cloud (Anubis -> Authentik; provider
notebook-proxy, internal_host caddy:8017) plus the post-auth route to the
published UI port. One upstream is enough, because the image's own Next.js
layer rewrites /api/* to the FastAPI beside it — so the API needs no outward
face at all, and 5056 moves to loopback, where only the deployer's health gate
dials it.
- scripts/open-notebook.env: API_URL and CORS_ORIGINS become the single guarded
origin. Left to itself the app auto-detects <host>:5055, the port seerr holds
on this host; a LAN-origin API_URL would also take the browser around the
guard chain, where its authenticated session does not ride.
- addn-hosts: the LAN A record. The homepage card goes live and links the vhost.
- Seam: the API origin is derived from whatever the Caddyfile routes to 8502, so
renaming the vhost moves the test instead of leaving it blessing a stale name,
and a new test proves the vhost hands the WHOLE request to Anubis.
podman wraps a bare HealthCmd as CMD-SHELL (measured on Dankclaw's podman 5.7:
--health-cmd "/surreal is-ready" stores {"Test":["CMD-SHELL","/surreal is-ready"]}),
and the pinned SurrealDB v2 image is distroless — no /bin/sh, not even `ls`.
So the probe could never run: every 30 s interval exited 1 in ~30 ms with empty
output while the database was listening and answering, and open-notebook's first
deploy died at the gate ("did not become healthy in 90s"). The hand-check
`podman exec … /surreal is-ready` printed OK, which is why the old comment
believed the probe worked.
The JSON array survives the Quadlet generator (--health-cmd "[\"/surreal\",\"is-ready\"]")
and stores ["CMD","/surreal","is-ready"], which execs directly: a throwaway
instance of the pinned digest went healthy on that form. The seam is re-pinned
to the shell-free contract; the old assertion forbade quotes in any HealthCmd,
which is what pinned the broken shape.
The refusal message still named "the /data state dir"; /data left with the
prefix disk tier. The serve script mounts /models ro, the rad-tune cache and the
chat template only, and tests/frank_archon_unit.bats asserts no :/data mount
exists, so the line an operator reads at the moment a boot refuses pointed at a
mount that is gone.
Text only. The guard still refuses: the block was run standalone with the
variable unset and every neighbour set - it prints the new message and exits 1.
bash -n clean, ./tests/run.sh green (454 tests).
The t/s ladder and the TTFT delta triple measure a configuration neither
deployed nor compared; per the purpose test they are dead weight. What survives
is the knob pricing (halving the shared chunk costs roughly a fifth of prefill
throughput), the long-prompt-only shape of the span win, and the method. Run-on
now names the era the census was taken in.
The endpoint moved to radiance 1.8.1 with MAX_SEQS=2 and the
--vram-weights-mib/--vram-kv-mib pair removed (PR #30); env, serve script and
bats carried the new shape while the page and the AGENTS.md block still
described the 1.0.13 3-slot era, so every point-of-use number was wrong.
Re-derived from the live checkout and the 2026-10-19 11:10 boot ledger, not
from the stale pre-#31 draft: runtime block (digest, version oracle, the two
CLI breaks that are boot refusals), shape table (demand-signal rows, derived
VRAM split, restored spec/batch row, host-only prefix tier, step sharing),
container contract (no /data mount), the measured 2-slot ledger, a new Eras row
for the retired 1.0.13 era whose rollback is a digest plus a trio rewrite, and
the laws: pool sizing and the per-card budget re-scoped to the pair era, a new
resolver law (funds ~90% of the worst case, host RAM below a slab step is inert,
MAX_SEQS is a demand signal), the sludge law marked measured-at-3-slots with the
fix ordered-not-verified, the knob-availability law flipped, and the slots law
now pricing the third slot in KV (4.20 -> 2.76 GiB).
`systemctl status` said `2x262144 slots over one 524288 pool, unquantized f16
K+V, MTP off` — three payload eras and two reslices out of date, and still
wrong about the thing that decides whether the endpoint can be trusted (the KV
dtype and whether the drafter is armed). It now quotes the env: 3x200704 over
one 602112 pool, f16 K + q8_0 V, MTP armed, adapter, Q8_0 vision.
Touching the unit selects the service in the planner, so this deliberately does
NOT come with a deploy: the hub is serving live conversations. The revision
marker stays behind until the next real frank-zealot change.
Before/after on the two probe prompts (both opened `I cannot provide…`; neither
now carries a marker — one ran to its 2048-token cap, the other finished at
1930), the residual `Important Disclaimer` heading named for what it is (style,
not the circuit), and the same-boot proof that chat/tools/vision still answer.
Provenance now points at the boot ledger: the fork prints every
`prism.abliterate.*` key at each start, so the PTQ1_0-vs-PQ2_0 mismatch is
visible to anyone who boots the service — the page links that instrument
instead of restating it.
- Shape table: an Adapter row (bytes, sha, what it edits, and the PTQ1_0
provenance asymmetry), the fetch line now names both fetchers, the flag list
carries --lora-scaled.
- One paragraph: the adapter changes behaviour, not the budget equation, and the
probe that proves it must budget >= 2048 tokens because the thinking channel
eats a short budget whole and returns empty content with finish_reason=length.
- Eras: the new era's rollback is one env line on a file already loaded.
- Laws: provenance is metadata, not a gate (tensor names, not hashes; an
embedding rank would crash, which is why the publisher left token_embd alone);
the fork pin now has a third reason, since older builds refuse the adapter with
`unsupported prism.hadamard.version: 2`. Base-alignment law updated: the 9B
refusal escape hatch was a fetch, and it has now been taken.
- AGENTS.md: topology payload cell and the zealot operator block.
Frank ordered the adapter; this adds it to the shape as one knob and one flag.
- `LORA_FILE` / `LORA_SCALE` in the env, `--lora-scaled <file>:<scale>` as ONE
argv token so a scale can never reach the engine without its adapter. The
rollback follows the mmproj convention exactly: `LORA_FILE=` (explicitly
empty) drops the flag entirely, no rebuild, and `LORA_SCALE=0` is the card's
own "inert but present" value.
- New fetcher `scripts/download-frank-zealot-uncensored-lora.sh`: `-f`, byte
count, sha256, `--verify-only`, idempotent. The file is NOT LFS (a plain git
object), so the pinned sha is the content hash, not an LFS oid.
- The deployer gates on the adapter beside the pack and the projector, and its
error names the ADAPTER's fetcher — sending an operator to the bonsai9 script
for a 3 MB file is how a payload ships without it.
- Seam: path+scale pinned as one token, the scale knob including 0, absence on
the empty opt-out, a refusal to boot on a missing adapter, and the env ↔
deployer anti-drift pair extended to LORA_FILE/LLM_ZEALOT_LORA. 454/454.
Provenance, stated where it will be read: the adapter's own metadata names
`Ternary-Bonsai-2-9B-PTQ1_0.gguf` (3561df7a…) as the pack the direction was
fitted against. This endpoint serves the PQ2_0+MTP+Q8_0 packing (c79fcdfa…),
which is not that file and is not on this host. The loader matches tensor names,
not hashes, so it applies — and build 10777 is the build the card verified on —
but the strength is calibrated on a sibling quantization. The proof is therefore
the refusal probe against the live endpoint, captured before and after, and not
the card's table.
The cutover PR merged the runtime; this carries the surface that has to be
true afterwards.
- Engine page: the shape is now `--device Vulkan0` on the gfx1151 as a
co-tenant beside frank-dragoon; the registry/thread/streaming laws gain a
fourth — the device law — whose numbers stay in the verdict report, and the
deploy record gets the cutover steps including the `glslc` configure gate.
The CPU-era arm/rollback prose keeps the qualitative argument and drops the
dead numbers per the purpose test.
- Endpoint page: "Where the engine computes" now says iGPU + co-tenancy, and
states the NPU verdict in one paragraph instead of a research tour.
- Quadlet comment: it claimed supplementary groups are what grant render
access. On this host the udev rule world-writes the render nodes and the
container's `id` shows no groups at all, so keep-groups is belt-and-braces;
the RSS note now matches the device shape instead of the CPU trial.
- Verdict report: gate 2 (contention) recorded as measured after the cutover,
and the build-stage prediction corrected — the package is `glslc`, not
`libvulkan-dev glslang-dev`.
- index.md regenerated (one description changed).
The NPU path is a dead end for this payload (verdict:
report/tts-npu-spike-verdict-2026-10-19.md); the iGPU is the accelerator that
exists on this box today, and it is already shared with frank-dragoon.
- Containerfile.engine: -DGGML_VULKAN=ON, plus the three packages the door
needs to configure — libvulkan-dev, spirv-headers, and glslc, which Ubuntu's
glslang-tools does NOT ship (find_package(Vulkan COMPONENTS glslc REQUIRED)
fails without it) — and libvulkan1 + mesa-vulkan-drivers (the RADV ICD) at
runtime. No NVIDIA ICD on purpose: one Vulkan device in the enumeration is
what makes the NAME Vulkan0 safe to write down.
- tts-engine-start.sh: QWENTTS_DEVICE -> --device, default Vulkan0. A value
that is set but EMPTY passes no flag at all, which is the CPU rollback; that
is why the default is written as an -v test and not with :=, because := also
fires on an empty value and would silently undo the rollback.
- quadlet: AddDevice=/dev/dri + GroupAdd=keep-groups (a rootless container that
drops its supplementary groups enumerates no render device). The node is not
named: this host is hybrid, renderD128 is the NVIDIA card and renderD129 the
amdgpu iGPU.
- env: QWENTTS_DEVICE=Vulkan0 plus the device law in the header, including the
rollback line.
- tests: the two CPU-only assertions now assert the Vulkan shape, and a new one
pins the rollback (empty device => no --device in argv). 451/451 green.
Measured before writing any of it: the configure in the digest-pinned base
answers "Found Vulkan: ... found components: glslc" and "Including Vulkan
backend"; gate 1 (RADV GFX1151 visible to a rootless container off this base)
is recorded in the verdict report.
Two conflicts, both from the 2026-10-19 vault compaction on main:
* frontmatter description — main shortened it to satisfy OKF DESC
(max 120 chars); this branch's longer wording would have failed the
seam. Kept main's shape and folded the new §9 in by naming
step-shape attribution instead of profiler attribution.
* the Related bullet for [[vLLM Porting and Compile Triage]] — that
page was destroyed on main, so the link is dropped rather than
resurrected; this branch's [[frank-archon]] row is kept.
Index rows regenerated with scripts/gen-vault-index.py.
The trial's quadlet line said AddDevice=/dev/dri/renderD128. Resolved the nodes by
driver instead of assuming: on this hybrid host renderD128 -> nvidia and
renderD129 -> amdgpu, so the guess pointed the engine at the wrong card. Also
records the gate-1 command that works (vulkaninfo --text; --batch prints help and
exits 1) and the probe script path.
vulkaninfo inside the engine's own base image (ubuntu:24.04 + mesa-vulkan-drivers
vulkan-tools, --device /dev/dri, rootless) reports Radeon 8060S Graphics (RADV
GFX1151) / driver radv / API 1.4.318 with two heaps: heap 0 host-visible 38.67 GiB
(budget 32.58) and heap 1 DEVICE_LOCAL 77.33 GiB (budget 65.16) with frank-dragoon
loaded. ggml's Vulkan backend asks for DEVICE_LOCAL, so the ~4 GiB the TTS engine
needs lands in the 65 GiB budget: memory is not the constraint, and the 2 GiB DRM
carve-out never enters the picture. Both heaps are GTT — the same host RAM, so the
budget is a ceiling on mappings, not free silicon memory.
Traps recorded: vulkaninfo --batch is not a flag in Ubuntu 24.04's vulkan-tools
(prints help, exits 1; use --text), and the container has no NVIDIA ICD, so Vulkan
device 0 happens to be the iGPU — select by name, not index.
Probe: /home/dank/spikes/npu-tts/vk_probe.sh on Dankclaw. Enumeration only; no
allocation, no compute, production untouched.
The overnight spike settled whether frank-tts can run on the Strix Halo NPU.
It cannot, and the wall is the loader, not the silicon: AMD's own Linux
runtime opens /dev/accel/accel0, succeeds at the GEM ioctls, then declines
the NuTTS-Air graph without emitting a single log line — and the one run that
did load has never reproduced. The accelerator that does exist is the gfx1151
iGPU behind -DGGML_VULKAN=ON, a flag our own Containerfile.engine writes OFF,
and Frank set the target shape to co-tenancy: the engine resident beside
frank-dragoon, not a handover.
- report/tts-npu-spike-verdict-2026-10-19.md owns the measured result: the
exoneration chain, the two arms' real-time bars (12.5 codes/s deployed vs
50.00 for NuTTS-Air), the 65,536-entry speech-token census (ids
151,671-217,206), the host gates (rootless cannot read accel0; dpkg-deb the
vendor XRT, never dpkg -i), the iGPU census (18,523 of 116,733 MiB GTT in
use, 17 GiB host RAM available, GTT pages are host pages), the two gates
that decide co-tenancy (RADV heap for an APU tenant; dragoon's TTFT with a
synthesis in flight), and the five-file change surface for the trial.
- report/npu-tts-runtime-landscape-2026-10-19.md and
report/qwen3-tts-payload-portability-2026-10-19.md are the research slices;
both now point at the verdict page instead of ending in loose ends.
- The vault page gains "Where the engine computes", so an operator doing a TTS
task learns the NPU is a closed door without re-walking it.
No fleet change: frank-tts / frank-tts-engine still serve narrator1-3 on CPU.
tests: ./tests/run.sh 450/450 green.
FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_SEQS 3 -> 2. At 1.8.1 the budget resolver sizes the KV cache
from the cache bound (--max-model-len x --max-num-seqs), --gpu-headroom-mib and
--host-pool-mib, and the shipped CLI has no KV-size flag (the
--vram-weights-mib/--vram-kv-mib pair was removed at 1.3.0). The live boot
ledger reads that cache at 4.20 GiB = 556,348 tokens = 2.8 sessions at 200,000,
so a third full-height conversation is refused while /health answers green and
the harness advertises capacity the engine cannot honour. Two slots is what the
shape actually serves at the full window; a slot costs KV, never decode, and the
fused TP all-reduce drops from 9 rows to 2 x (1 + spec) = 6, still inside
wht6's 25-row bit-exact bound.
FRANK_ARCHON_HOST_POOL_MIB back to 44928 and FRANK_ARCHON_TTM_MIN_MIB back to
150000, reverting PR #30. That raise bought cache the resolver never hands out:
the two boot ledgers differ in exactly one line -- host_pool 44.47 -> 45.09 GiB
-- while vram_weights (25.81 GiB) and vram_kv (4.20 GiB / 556,348 tokens, both
ranks) are byte-identical, so the extra 640 MiB sat unclaimed in the host pool
while the TTM floor moved out from under the preflight's arithmetic. The
compute-bound cap on --host-pool-mib is unchanged either way (45,568 -> 22,222
MiB of experts either side of the 22,222 clamp).
The bats seam pins the new contract: MAX_SEQS=2, pool 44,928, and the ledger
floor that computes to 148,920 MiB at that pool against the 150,000 minimum.
*Documentation Policy* rewritten: a page earns its bytes only if it changes what
the reader does next. Measurements are disposable — a rate for anything not
running and not being compared is destroyed, not filed in an Eras row or a
technique page. "It is the only copy" is explicitly NOT a reason to keep a fact.
`log.md` retired from the policy; the Runbook Index no longer promises a page per
retired endpoint (rollback is a commit, not a document).
*Key Lessons Learned* purged of the dead: the dual-R9700 board-swap narrative and
the layer-split/x4-pair experiment laws (no live endpoint uses either), the QSA
patch note and the retired Kairic/FastMTP traps, and the throughput figures inside
the laws that survive — the law stays, the number goes. Two lessons added, both
from this campaign's own failures: a verdict is a lead, the scout's and the tool's
alike; and never let a census decide what to keep, because a tool can say where a
fact lives but not whether anything needs it.
997 → 820 lines.
The vault was 155 pages / 31,210 lines, most of it measurement ledgers for
payloads that no longer run. A throughput figure for a runtime nobody operates is
not a record: AI moves faster than the vault, so the number is wrong before
anyone reads it, and a wrong number in a runbook gets believed. Per the new
purpose test in `AGENTS.md` → *Documentation Policy*, it is destroyed.
Gone (`.AGENTTRASH/20261019-destruction/`, KILL-LIST.txt is the manifest):
- the `frank-medium` endpoint and its five era pages, `frank-npu`, FastFlowLM,
the ikllama/kingjones/dealign/frank-redo eras, the ling/swift15/freetoken/ubatch
campaign pages, qwen3.8 spec-matrix and strix-optimizations, the two
"Running Qwen3.6 …" pages;
- the whole `Pipeline Parallelism/` folder (no live script passes a pipeline flag)
and the multi-device/x4-pair/hybrid/offload experiment pages;
- every vLLM page — no vLLM endpoint exists on this fleet;
- `LLM/deployment.md` (`Architecture/Deployment Flow.md` is the test-referenced
owner) and the external surveys (SGLang, Lemonade, llama.cpp forks/diff,
self-hosted app census, the TTS survey) that were obsolete by construction;
- `log.md`, 2,380 lines. Git holds the chronology; a causal law belongs to the
page that owns the thing it governs, never to a diary.
Survivors: 101 pages, 17,542 lines, 0 OKF violations, 0 unresolved links. Eras
tables keep the window, payload, runtime, reason and rollback pointer; the rate
columns are blanked. The live shapes stay verbatim — those numbers are what the
deployer and `models.yml` consume.
Point-of-use enforcement needs hands, not advice:
- `destroy-vault.py` — moves the pages on a kill list to `.AGENTTRASH/` and then
deletes every reference to them from the survivors, including the whole line
when the dead link was the line's only content. Stems are seeded from the trash
so the pass is re-runnable; `pathlib.Path.stem` is NOT used to compare link
targets, because it strips the real suffix off names like `sd.cpp`.
- `axe-measurements.py` — deletes bench/throughput ledger sections and rate rows,
blanks any table cell that reports a rate, and folds Eras older than the current
one into a single row that says the numbers were destroyed and that rollback is
a commit. Never touches a shape number or a Law/Wire/Rollback section.
- `repair-damage.py` — fixes the two artifacts those passes can leave (a list
marker that lost its space, a table separator left without its header).
- `restore-punctuation.py` — restores a line whose only difference from HEAD is
stripped trailing punctuation. Written after `repair-damage.py`'s first version
matched every wrapped prose line ending in a comma and deleted 660 of them: the
rule is now `… see .` only, and the incident is recorded in its docstring.
- `gen-vault-index.py` — never walks into `.AGENTTRASH/`, and sweeps rows whose
page cell is empty (a description left nameless by a destruction).
Full suite: 451 tests pass.
The 1.8.1 boot resolved the budget resolver to 4.20 GiB of cache a card —
556,348 tokens, 2.8 sessions at full height — so three concurrent
full-height requests are refused with a 400 at admission: the endpoint's
3-slot contract is broken by the cutover, silently, because /health and
every shorter conversation still answer.
The resolver gives the expert plane whatever the pinned host pool cannot
hold and the cache the rest, so the pool is the lever: +640 MiB a rank
moves that much expert demand into host RAM and the cache wins it back.
Tokens scale with the GiB won (8.11 KiB/token at fp8), so ~0.63 GiB buys
~44,000 tokens — 600,000 with margin — at ~2.5% off the expert slab.
TTM floor moves with the pool (2 x pool + 48,824 + prefix + MNBT =
150,200 MiB computed by the ledger test).
Verified by the boot ledger's `kv:` line and the probe's capacity leg,
not by this arithmetic.
The decode stall is step contention (measured: 18.7 ms decode-only steps
against 317 ms steps that carry a prefill chunk, decode at 13 t/s median
while prefill runs), and the two engine knobs that fix it arrived after this
endpoint's pin. Moving to 1.8.1 (2026-10-18) brings both, and brings two CLI
breaks with them:
- --vram-weights-mib / --vram-kv-mib were REMOVED at 1.3.0. The per-card
split between the expert slab and the KV pool is now derived by the
engine's budget resolver from --gpu-headroom-mib, the cache bound
(--max-model-len, --max-num-seqs) and --host-pool-mib, and the cache may
lend idle blocks to the expert slab. The slab size and the pool's token
count are boot-ledger lines from here on, so the capacity contract
(3 x 200,000 fp8) is verified live by the probe's capacity leg instead of
computed from an env number.
- The prefix cache has no disk tier any more: --prefix-cache-dir and
--prefix-cache-disk-mib are refusals and --prefix-cache-host-mib is
--prefix-cache-mib. 64 GiB of parked KV on NVMe becomes re-prefill, so
prefix_hit_rate is the thing to watch after this boot.
env: image re-pinned to the 1.8.1 digest; the pair and the disk tier dropped;
FRANK_ARCHON_PREFIX_CACHE_MIB replaces the host/disk pair; new
FRANK_ARCHON_BUSY_PREFILL_CHUNK=auto (explicit, because auto vs off is the
difference between decode waiting one chunk and waiting a whole step) and
FRANK_ARCHON_PREFILL_INTERLEAVE=0 (opt-in through a guarded argv array).
serve: argv follows the new CLI, /data mount and the pre-created kvcache path
go with the disk tier, and the retired env keys are no longer required (they
would abort ExecStart). autoresearch-frank-archon.sh takes the same CLI, with
a cold prefill now coming from --prefix-cache-mib 0 instead of a per-run disk
directory. run-swift15-bf16.sh is untouched: it pins its own engines by design.
tests: the two budget-arithmetic seams asserted knobs that no longer exist and
are replaced by one seam that asserts the retired knobs are ABSENT from env and
argv - a stale line is a boot refusal, not a no-op. The container-contract seam
now asserts the tune mount and the absence of /data.
dank
Frank
