A by-digest pull leaves the image carrying every digest it was pulled under, so
reading RepoDigests[0] reported a healthy pinned image as wrong and refused a
window that was ready to run. Membership, not position. Also records the measured
step optimum: 106 tok/s at an 8,192-token step against 76 at 16,384 on a 32,768
calibration window, so the wide step has a ceiling, not a plateau.
Each gate the window used was a proxy, and each lied at least once:
- /health answered 200 from the dying production process (window dead at second zero)
- podman inspect named a rig container that had bound nothing
- the space check asked a directory that merely looked related
- the identity check compared podman's CONTAINER-internal pids (1, 7) to an ss host pid
scripts/qwen38-preflight.sh now checks cwd, the digest a tag actually resolves to,
free space on the tap's own filesystem, stale grams, every /dev/kfd holder's host pid
(podman top <ctr> hpid) and the :7770 listener's host pid against the service's, the
corpus and the reference recording; it prints PASS/FAIL per fact and exits 2. The
window calls it before a card is touched, and its duplicated checks are gone.
Frank