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>
Quat3rnion/halogen-qwen3.8-flash-next-v2-abliterated is now the NATIVE
2026-10-11 v2 conversion of orcarouter's pinned BF16 (66,687,678,432 B,
LFS sha256 b5bd925f...) — 32 bytes smaller than the writer transplant it
used to ship under the same filename. The n-gram table, vision tower and
tokenizer are the stock peonist companions, hardlinked out of the swift15
payload dir: the release publishes only the main file and no source-matched
pair exists, so the engine's own tools are the referee (niah 18/18, ppl
3.968 with mean KL 0.155 against the swift15 logits, 2026-10-17).
Memory saving, per the card: HALOGEN_KV_POOL_POSITIONS 524288 -> 262144,
one pool behind both slots (boot ledger: 7.2 GiB, where the old pool
measured 14.6). HALOGEN_CTX stays 262144 so the per-request ceiling and the
harness contract (contextWindow 217088) do not move; only two MAXIMUM-length
conversations lose the ability to coexist.
Measured against the swift15 boot on identical traffic: cold prefill
+12.6 %, decode 50.0 vs 46.8 t/s, NIAH 18/18 vs 17/18, PPL +2.3 %, thinking
tokens x1.9 (the finetune's reasoning compression is gone), refusals 0/5 on
both.
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.
Frankandomp