The CIRU launcher gates on hip/lib/libamdhip64.so + rocr/lib/libhsa-runtime64.so
under its runtime root and exits 2 without them; the build links the private
venv through its RUNPATH, so point those entries at the venv's unversioned
devel symlinks (idempotent ln -sfn). Without this the unit crash-looped for
the full 2400s health gate on first deploy.
Operator call 2026-09-19: switch the iGPU endpoint from
halogen-flash-server to jcbtc/Qwen3.8-Flash-CIRU-STRIX-Orca on the CIRU
v4.4.1 runtime with the QSA window hotfix (host build against the private
ROCm 10 SDK), one stream of the full 262144 trained window. The service
leaves the quadlet shape for a root unit (the same shape as frank-small and
frank-medium: a private-SDK host binary has no image to install and no
generated unit to dodge); the halogen quadlet is archived, the deploy
handler retires it on the host, gates on 7770, and its stray-run sweep
matches the model path so it cannot take frank-small down.
Operator call 2026-09-19: switch the target to
orcarouter/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-GGUF Q8_0 (gated repo; the fetch script now
requires an HF token and verifies sha256, not just size), take the drafter to
the Q4_K_M rung of z-lab/Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-GGUF, cut the pool to two
163840-token conversations (327680, entirely inside the trained 262144
window), and balance the tensors across the cards (32:33) in place of the
35:30 x16-lean. The in-file MTP head stays one SPEC_TYPE change away.
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.
int8_per_token_head: page-size unification fails (scale tensor breaks
the 256/512 head-dim ratio). turboquant_k8v4: backend validation fails
(no mm-prefix attention, which Gemma4's vision/audio path requires).
fp8: hardware-dead on sm_86. bf16 it is; history documented in
frank-small.env, seam pins auto + no backend pin.
The VLLM_ATTENTION_BACKEND env var does not exist in this vLLM dev
build (warns 'Unknown vLLM environment variable' and is ignored), so
the pin landed nowhere and Gemma4's hook force-selected TRITON_ATTN
again. Pass --attention-backend TURBOQUANT as a CLI flag instead.
Gemma4's config hook force-selects TRITON_ATTN for the mixed 256/512
head dims whenever no backend is selected, and TRITON_ATTN rejects the
turboquant KV dtype (measured: 'kv_cache_dtype not supported', crash
loop). The TURBOQUANT backend accepts any head size and the
turboquant_* dtypes, and the Gemma4 MTP speculator carries the
target's selected backend through to the draft layers.
int8_per_token_head keeps a separate fp32 scale tensor per (token,
head); Gemma4's hybrid head dims (SWA 256 / full 512) make the
per-token page bytes 4160 vs 8256, not an integer ratio, so
unify_kv_cache_spec_page_size raises NotImplementedError — nine
crash-loop restarts measured. TurboQuant k8v4 packs its block scales
inside the tensor, keeps the 2:1 page ratio, and has a dedicated
backend with an explicit Ampere path. 289,647 -> ~772k-token pool.
fp8 KV is hardware-dead on the 3090 (sm_86, no cvt.e4m3x2), so int8 is
the cheapest quant the TRITON_ATTN backend can run: pure ALU dequant,
same backend, no fp8 tensor cores needed. 289,647 -> ~579k-token pool,
two -> four full-context sessions. Quality verified against the bf16
baseline (needle-in-haystack at 213k + short battery) before the swap.
podman 5.7.0's v1 quadlet generator rejects both ContainerEntrypoint
and Entry; the key is Entrypoint= (pkg/systemd/quadlet/quadlet.go
KeyEntrypoint, mapped to --entrypoint).
The podman 5.x v1 quadlet generator on dankclaw rejects
ContainerEntrypoint with 'unsupported key in group Container', so the
unit was never generated and the deploy died at restart with 'Unit
frank-small.service not found'. Entry= is the v1 spelling.
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
--cache-ram caps the total bytes of saved prompt states in HOST RAM, and
alloc() refuses any single state larger than the whole cap. That refusal was
firing in production: 137 times in the two days from 2026-09-16, at 11.0-11.4
GiB per state, so every conversation past ~170k tokens was uncacheable and
re-prefilled from scratch on its next turn.
The state law at this shape is 68 KiB/token (16 full-attention layers x 4 kv
heads x 256 dim x 2 B x 2 for K/V, plus the MTP draft context's 4096 B), so
8192 MiB held ~120k tokens and 16384 holds ~240k: a FULL 196608-token slot
state (~12.8 GiB) now fits with ~3 GiB spare.
Host RAM only, allocated on demand and never pinned, so the VRAM fit is
untouched. New seam: the cap must clear one full slot's state and stay under
half the host's RAM (it fails on the old 8192 and passes on 16384). Also
corrects the adjacent claim that 0 is the build's default for
--ctx-checkpoints -- this binary's --help says 32.
A pending entry for frank-default-sightsound (FLM NPU endpoint retired
2026-09-11) survived in the dankclaw state store and made every --pending
run exit 2 at the dispatcher before the Playwright e2e gate could
execute. The pending pass now drops entries the target no longer allows
into ~/.AGENTTRASH and keeps going. Behavioral seam test added.
- services.json: frank-large/medium/small move from admin-only to the user
page with current descriptions (halogen w4b iGPU; 35:30 layer-split MTP
27B on the R9700s; Gemma4-12B QAT vision path on the 3090) and docs
links to /docs#models
- docs.html: static user documentation (access chain, model guide, media
how-tos, troubleshooting); served at /docs via the post-auth homepage
listener; shipped by deploy_homepage; footer + index link to it
- tests: pages seam asserts the docs contract (page, link, Caddy route,
deployer copy)
- vault: Homepage.md synced (docs landing shipped, cards reclassified)
The two R9700s sit on unequal PCIe paths: ROCm0 (03:00.0) is CPU-root-port
Gen4 x16 (~31.5 GB/s); ROCm1 (0b:00.0) rides the B650 chipset through
bridges negotiating Gen4 x1 (~1.97 GB/s). With the MTP drafter, output
layers and heavier compute buffers pinned to the last-layers card, live
rocm-smi read 98% busy on the x1 card vs 40% on the x16 card. Moving one
DeltaNet layer (34) to ROCm0 shifts ~0.43 GiB off the bottlenecked card;
the seam fit lands 30.59/30.01 with gap 0.58 GiB, inside floor and slack.
36:29 fails both gates, so this lever is spent.
signal-cli 0.14.7 parses an all-digit -a value as a phone number (the
numeric account name never resolves), and the message is a -m option,
not a positional (a positional is parsed as a second recipient).
Verified live: corrected invocation returns type SUCCESS.
The bridge-subnet-only pair dropped the host's own health probe
(source 192.168.0.143/127.0.0.1) and failed a healthy deploy. The
deployer now installs the full set: ACCEPT 127.0.0.1, ACCEPT the host
IP, ACCEPT 10.89.0.0/16, then DROP.
169.254.1.2 is not a local address on this host (netavark runs its
bridges in aardvark-dns' netns), so the relay cannot bind it — and a
loopback bind refuses container traffic. Probe-socket proof: a host
socket on 192.168.0.143:18094 answers the container's 169.254.1.2:18094
dial while the LAN IP refuses from the container. The relay binds
192.168.0.143:18093 and the deployer installs an iptables INPUT pair
(ACCEPT 10.89.0.0/16, DROP rest) so the unauthenticated endpoint stays
off the LAN.
A socket bound to 127.0.0.1 refuses container traffic that arrives via
the podman bridge: the first live webhook failed with 'dial tcp
169.254.1.2:18093: connection refused'. The relay now binds the
host-gateway endpoint — link-local to the podman bridge, off the LAN —
and the deployer's health probe follows it there.
The 393216/34:31/MTP deploy measured 30.78 GiB on ROCm1 against the
fit's 28.32 — the MTP draft buffers (one nextn layer's KV, 4096 B/pos,
plus draft buffers) came in 2.46 GiB above the estimate. Recalibrate
the seam's MTP constant to the measured 4.20 GiB total charge on card
1 and drop the floor 1.5 -> 1.0 GiB for this shape (ROCm1's 1.08 GiB
headroom is real; 35:30/36:29 fail card 0's floor at this pool, so
34:31 is the only split that fits 2x196k).
AGENTS.md and the runbook move to the MTP drafter: 34:31, 393216 pool
(196608 per conversation), the DFlash2 sidecar documented as a
one-line revert, and a dated part-2 section with the fit/measured
table and the recalibration.
DFlash2's sidecar (1.92 GiB + buffers on ROCm1) kept the 393216 pool off the table; the MTP head lives in the target file, so its cost is one nextn layer's KV (4096 B/pos) plus small buffers. Fit: ROCm0 29.77 / ROCm1 28.32 GiB, over the floor, 34:31 the balance point at this pool. n_max 3 is the measured MTP winner. The seam's fit is now drafter-aware, the slack is the deployed integer gap (1483 MiB), the ctx cap 393216 with the rope caveat (top 131k extrapolates on the base rope).
CTX_SIZE=1048576 / PARALLEL=4: every slot gets the model's full trained
window. Measured fit arithmetic on the 3090: 1 full-context slot idles
at 11,996 MiB, 4 at 22,346 -> 3,450 MiB per slot, ~8,546 MiB fixed.
A 5th slot projects 25.8 GiB past the 24,576 MiB card, and the KV pool
allocates upfront, so 4 is the ceiling. Explicit CTX_SIZE bypasses --fit
on purpose: fit maximises the TOTAL pool and would divide a smaller
window across slots at parallel>1. The slot-grid seam now pins both the
full-window division and the budget inequality so a future capacity
bump fails pre-deploy, not in the boot allocation.
Audio verified while measuring: the mmproj's audio encoder transcribes
input_audio parts verbatim (JFK WAV sample). Header comments updated.
The Qwen3.8-27B IQ3_S file carried its own MTP head; Gemma4's ships as a
separate assistant file (mtp-gemma-4-12B-it.gguf, arch gemma4-assistant,
4 nextn layers) that loads via --model-draft and shares the target's last
layers' KV. The draftless ngram-mod matcher chains behind it in the same
--spec-type value — two context-backed drafters cannot share one process,
so this chain is the only shape that carries both.
KV is q8_0 (16 KiB/token/layer vs 32 at f16) and CTX_SIZE is unset so
--fit sizes the pool against what the 7.4 GiB of payloads leave on the
24 GiB card. build-cuda was rebuilt with -DGGML_CUDA_FA_ALL_QUANTS=ON,
which quantized KV on CUDA requires. The three seams that pinned the Qwen
contract (MTP-in-file, the Qwen mmproj name, the f16 KV arithmetic) now
pin the Gemma4 contract instead, and the deploy handler's presence check
points at the new payload.
The 36:29/327680/vision deploy came up healthy and text-only: image requests
answered 500 'image input is not supported - hint: ... provide the mmproj'
with no mmproj line in the load log, so llama-server fb27a525 does not
autoload mmproj*.gguf from the model directory. Name the file, the way
frank-small's serve script already does, and pin the flag in the seam.
The 320k pool (163840 per conversation over two slots) costs ~4.3 GiB of KV,
and the BF16 projector (888 MiB) lands on ROCm0. Fit at the deployed point,
computed, not estimated: ROCm0 29.19 / ROCm1 26.04 GiB of 31.86 -- 2.67 / 5.82
GiB free, both above the 1.5 GiB floor.
36:29 is one layer over the 35:30 balance on purpose: at this context the
balance point is 34:31 (0.11 GiB gap), and the operator moved a layer to ROCm0
to buy headroom on the drafter card. The gap is 3.15 GiB by construction, so
the seam's slack is that gap rounded up (3225 MiB) with the trade written down,
and the ctx cap moves 262144 -> 327680 with the rope caveat (the GGUF carries
no scaling; positions past the trained 262144 extrapolate on the base rope).
Vision: NO_MMPROJ=0, the serve script now refuses to start without the
projector when vision is on (a missing file is a deploy error, not a silent
text-only server), the download script fetches and byte-verifies it, and the
deploy handler's preflight checks for it. The projector is already on the host,
byte- and sha256-verified against the Hub.
The batch/ubatch sweep (scripts/bench-batch-ubatch.sh, 23 cells of a 28-cell
grid, 3 reps each) says the ubatch knob has an OPTIMUM, not a plateau:
ubatch 256 384 512 768 1024 1280 1536 1792 2048
tok/s 1046 1068 1193 1135 1152 1151 1165 1148 1078
The curve is remarkably reproducible -- 512 came out 1192.88 / 1193.23 /
1193.28 / 1193.88 across batch 2048, 4096, 6144 and 8192, and 2048 came out
1077.38 / 1077.54 / 1077.59 -- so this is a deterministic property of the
shape, not noise. The logical batch is throughput-neutral (2048..8192 all
within 2 % at a fixed ubatch) and VRAM-neutral (the compute buffers are sized
by ubatch alone). Decode is 15.88 tok/s at depth 65536 on every single cell.
So the deployed 6144x1536 was both 2.4 % slower than the optimum and 3.71 GiB
more expensive. Measured at the deployed shape (262144, 2 slots, DFlash2):
36,29 ubatch 1536 -> 4.71 / 4.91 GiB free (what was deployed)
36,29 ubatch 512 -> 6.01 / 7.32 GiB free (ubatch alone)
35,30 ubatch 512 -> 6.44 / 6.90 GiB free <- deployed
The ubatch move freed 1.30 GiB on ROCm0 but 2.41 GiB on ROCm1, because ROCm1
holds the output layers and the drafter's graphs -- so it shifted the balance
toward ROCm1 by 1.31 GiB and the split had to follow it one layer. 0.46 GiB is
one DeltaNet layer's worth of asymmetry, i.e. the granularity floor: no split
can be tuned finer than a layer, which is why 34,31 is not better.
Re-fitted the seam with both ubatch coefficients measured at this shape and
re-anchored it on the new deployed point (it reproduces 6.44 / 6.90 to
0.01 GiB). Every neighbouring split still fails it: 36,29 -> 1.85, 34,31 ->
0.94, 37,28 -> 3.24, 1,1 -> 3.03, 39,26 -> 6.03 GiB.
Also replaced the unit test's literal `TENSOR_SPLIT=36,29` assertion with the
shape it actually cares about -- two shares that add up to the model's 65
blocks, with ROCm1 taking the fewer -- so re-measuring the balance no longer
breaks a test about parallelism. The numeric contract lives in the seam test.
DSpark came off after a day. It was the better-looking file (1.27 GiB against
1.92) but it declares no sliding window, and the draft context is built with
n_ctx = llama_n_ctx(ctx_tgt) -- so its KV spanned the whole 262144-token window
(5.0 GiB) and cost ROCm1 four layers of split to carry. DFlash2's window bounds
its draft KV at 2048 positions (~40 MiB), which frees ~4.3 GiB on the
draft-carrying card.
The balance point moved with it, so it was re-measured at the deployed batch
(6144 x 1536, 2 slots, 262144) rather than interpolated:
39,26 2.42 / 7.20 37,28 4.28 / 5.34 35,30 5.14 / 4.48
38,27 3.85 / 5.77 36,29 4.71 / 4.91 34,31 6.57 / 3.05
36:29 is the minimum (0.20 GiB apart) and leaves 3.2 GiB above the operator's
1.5 GiB floor on each card, so the full window stays. One -ts step is one layer,
and qwen35's layers are not the same size -- 0.43 GiB on a DeltaNet boundary,
1.43 GiB on a full-attention one -- which is why the table exists.
Also in here:
- the fetch script pointed at the wrong file (DSpark) AND declared the wrong
size for it: 1359284737 against the Hub's 1455376576, 96 MB short, which made
--verify-only fail on a payload that was in fact correct. Repointed at z-lab
DFlash2 Q8_0, 2056414816, and both files' sha256 were checked against the
Hub's LFS oids (host == Hub for both).
- the seam's fit was recalibrated for a window-bounded draft KV and for the new
point; it now passes 36:29 and fails every other split measured, including
1:1. Its ubatch term is an extrapolation and it cannot model contiguity, which
the comment says out loud.
- the serve script's dead dspark-only tunables (n-min, p-min, p-split, poll)
are gone; the build's defaults apply.
The operator's revised spec: batch x3 (6144/1536), parallel 2, a 1.5 GiB per-card
floor, and the context maximised inside it.
Measured at 262144 with the old 38:27 split, 3x batch was brutally asymmetric:
ROCm1 (output layers + the drafter's graphs) paid ~3.3 GiB where ROCm0 paid
~1.7, leaving the draft-carrying card at 0.08 GiB free against ROCm0's 3.78.
One -ts step is worth ~1.5 GiB at this batch, so the balance is a measurement:
41:24 overshot (1.47 / 2.38), 40:25 landed at 1.92 / 1.96 GiB free.
That balance is also what maximises the context -- an unbalanced split would have
to buy its headroom out of CTX_SIZE, and CTX_SIZE is already at the model's
trained window (262144), now split over two slots of 131072. Verified under two
concurrent 1832-token prompts: 200/200, 1.87 / 1.86 GiB free, n_slots = 2,
n_ctx_slot = 131072, tool calls intact, and DSpark drafting on BOTH slots
(acceptance 0.38/0.22 and 0.52/0.43).
8192/2048 does not fit at this context at all: its 2020 MiB pp buffer fails to
allocate on ROCm1, and 4096/1024 fits but leaves 1.11 GiB -- both recorded in
the env's sizing table.
The unit seam now models both cards (share + draft + ubatch-scaled buffers,
calibrated to the rocm-smi figures to within 0.002%), asserts the 1.5 GiB floor
on each, and asserts the two cards stay within 0.5 GiB of each other. Both
assertions were confirmed to FAIL on a deliberately bad config (ubatch 8192, and
a 1:1 split) rather than pass by construction.
DSpark declares no sliding window, so its draft context -- built with
n_ctx = llama_n_ctx(ctx_tgt) -- caches the whole target window: 5 layers x 2 x 8
kv heads x 128 dim x 2 B = 20 KiB/position, i.e. 5.0 GiB at 262144, where
DFlash2's sliding_window 2048 cost ~40 MiB. At a 1:1 split that put ROCm1 at
33.9 GB of 34.2 GB and the first draft graph capture died inside
common_speculative_impl_draft_dflash::process with "ROCm error: out of memory"
-- after the model had loaded and /health had answered, which is why the deploy
looked like a crash-loop rather than a sizing failure.
Handing three target layers to ROCm0 restores headroom on both cards at the full
window. Measured at 262144: 28.52 GB / 30.71 GB, i.e. 5.30 GiB and 3.26 GiB free
(was 2.7 GB free on the draft-carrying card with 1:1 + DFlash2). The unit seam
now models the busier card as a skewed share plus the drafter's full-context KV,
calibrated to the rocm-smi figure.
AGENTS.md gains the durable lesson: read sliding_window out of the drafter's
GGUF header before sizing a spec-decode deployment.
DSpark (Q8_0, 1.27 GiB) replaces z-lab DFlash2 (1.92 GiB): same 5-layer
block-diffusion shape, Markov head instead of the candidate selector, and
block_size 7, so the draft depth drops 7 -> 6 (llama.cpp asserts
n_max <= block_size - 1).
The serve script's dspark branch never passed --spec-draft-model (only the
dflash branch did), so dspark was not deployable as written; the model file
gate now covers both types. Download script, env and the unit seam track the
new file and its exact byte count.
hermes-webui is Network=host, so 8787 is a bare host-netns bind, and netavark
DNATs only *published* ports. From Caddy's bridge netns 192.168.0.143:8787 and
10.89.1.1:8787 are both refused, while host.containers.internal:8787
(169.254.1.2) answers 200 — measured live 2026-09-16 from inside the Caddy
container. The dashboard's published 9119 answers on that same LAN IP, which is
what made the old upstream look sound.
The vhost comment asserted "192.168.0.143:8787 is open" from that bridge; it is
not, so the claim is replaced with the measurement, and the hermes-webui quadlet
comment carries the same correction. The seam guarding this invariant accepted
any numeric upstream, so the LAN IP passed it; it now pins the measured-working
form and fails on the LAN IP (teeth verified by substitution).
ngram-mod is draftless (added to the spec config vector unconditionally, while
every model-backed drafter needs ctx_dft), so unlike MTP it can share the
process with DFlash2. Chained at the fleet's 48/64 window, over three shapes:
prose 1k/512 dflash 43.77 | ngram 17.72 (0 drafts) | chain 43.65
echo 1.5k/400 dflash 76.82 | ngram 102.50 | chain 200.58
structured/400 dflash 91.08 | ngram 17.80 (0 drafts) | chain 91.22
identity dflash 70.37 | ngram 17.77 | chain 70.40
On prose the chain is byte-identical to the drafter alone (same 119 drafts/49
accepts) -- that is what makes it a safe default -- and on prompt-echo traffic
it is 2.6x. VRAM is unchanged: the matcher is a 64 MiB host-RAM hash table.
The window sweep says keep the long one: 48/64 beats 16/32 (161.0) and 8/16
(113.8) on echo, and shortening it costs prose (43.9 -> 36.0) because the
matcher then proposes on ordinary fragments and the rejections still have to be
verified. That is the 'ngram hurts' result this fleet hit twice before.
Two documentation traps recorded with it: ngram-mod prints NO startup banner in
this build (its drafts are only visible behaviourally), and the harness's
'structured' shape is a negative control because its lines differ.
Four configurations of the same binary, identical prompts at temperature 0, the
unit stopped between runs, on the deployed payload:
none 17.7 tok/s card1 26.07 GB
draft-mtp n=3 32.4 tok/s 58 % accepted card1 29.35 GB
draft-mtp n=7 26.7 tok/s 33 % accepted card1 29.65 GB
draft-dflash 7 43.5 tok/s 41 % accepted card1 29.42 GB
DFlash2 is worth 2.46x over autoregressive and 34 % over the best MTP, and all
four produced IDENTICAL greedy text, so the 'lossless verification' claim in the
runbook is now a check rather than an assumption. MTP is not the cheaper option
either: its head loads ~3.3 GB against the drafter's 2.06 GB file, and deeper
drafting loses (n=7 accepts a third of its proposals, n=3 more than half).
The two CANNOT be chained, and the failure is structural rather than tunable:
'spec-type draft-mtp,draft-dflash' dies at load with 'context type MTP requested
but model doesn't contain MTP layers', because a chain has ONE draft context and
MTP builds against whatever model that context holds -- here the DFlash2 file.
The serve script therefore passes --spec-draft-model in the dflash branch ONLY,
and the seam now asserts exactly that (the wiring whose violation is this
error), plus that the deployment stays on the measured winner.
scripts/bench-spec-ab.py makes the comparison reproducible: the benchmarking
policy wants the runtime's own harness for this, and the numbers above were
otherwise unreproducible one-offs.
Context: 262144 was measured before it was deployed -- 24.72 GB on GPU 0 and
29.14 GB on GPU 1 of 34.21 GB each, ~5 GB of headroom on the busier card, and a
140,069-token prompt prefilled through the single slot in 134 s to prove the
window is real. The 114688 wall was the vLLM predecessor's arithmetic, not this
runtime's.
Throughput, measured through the service: 1.0-1.4k tok/s prefill from 4k to
140k, 43.8 tok/s decode on a 512-token generation, 41-71 % DFlash2 acceptance,
and the prefix cache re-prefilling 4 of 998 tokens on a repeated prompt.
The signals move with the runtime, so the fleet's rules and dashboard are
re-cut rather than renamed: vllm: series do not exist any more, and two of the
old rules watched things llama.cpp does not export at all (KV-pool fill, p95
latency). Those are retired with the reason written down, and LlmSpecDecodeOff
takes one of the slots -- a lost drafter is the failure no client can see. The
observability seam now fails if any rule names a series the endpoint does not
export, which is what would have caught the stale vllm: expressions.
omp models.yml (outside the repo) is updated in the same pass: contextWindow
262144, and the full reasoning-effort map, because Qwen3.8's template answers
500 on 'high' -- verified against the live endpoint, low/medium/xhigh answer
200. Subagents run at high.
The vllm-radiance replica pair could not use both cards for one model: TP=2
needs a cross-card collective and the second R9700 cannot dispatch one. The
same wall blocks vLLM's pipeline parallelism, whose stage handoff is an RCCL
send/recv of the hidden state (distributed/parallel_state.py) -- a fact worth
writing down, because the obvious reading of the ask ('use PP to dodge the
atomics problem') is exactly backwards.
llama.cpp's layer split needs no collective at all: layers are distributed and
the boundary activation is a per-backend copy, once per forward pass. One
process, both cards, one model. The runtime is mainline llama.cpp at fb27a525
(the ref is pinned by DFlash2 AND qwen35 MTP; the ROCmFPX fork this host had
before has neither), built for gfx1201 against the private ROCm 7.14 toolchain
the earlier build already used, and bundled next to the binary.
Server: ajgazin Swift-Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored UD-Q8_K_XL with the model's MTP
head in the file, plus the z-lab DFlash2 Q8_0 block-diffusion drafter at depth
7 (its block is 8, so 7 is the ceiling llama.cpp allows). Text only: vision
stays on frank-small.
Retired into the trash rather than deleted: the three vLLM quadlets, the
radiance entrypoint/healthcheck, the routing proxy and its tests, and the two
bench scripts that drove 'vllm bench serve' inside the retired image. The
deploy handler now stops them, waits for 7770 to be released, installs the
ROOT unit and refuses to start anything when the runtime or payload is
missing. The planner maps the scripts/ trio to frank-medium only, and the
scoping seam asserts the retired service dir is gone rather than merely
unmapped.
The 2026-09-16 halogen restore failed exactly here. The ik root unit stopped,
systemd logged "Deactivated successfully", pasta tried to bind 7770 about a
second later, reported "Address already in use", and the quadlet exited 126.
Only Restart=on-failure recovered it -- minutes later, which is not a deploy.
The handler now waits for every socket on the port to clear (listener, accepted
and TIME_WAIT) before installing and starting the quadlet, and fails loudly with
the socket table attached if it never does. The retirement also reports when the
unit file was already gone, because this host's `disable` deletes it.
frank-large has no /metrics to scrape any more, and scraping it would be red by
construction: the halogen engine publishes /health, /cache and /v1/* only. That
job is removed with the reason written down (the remedy is the blackbox
exporter this fleet already wants for the comfyui/services probes), and
frank-small's llama.cpp endpoint takes the slot at 192.168.0.143:7771.
Homepage: frank-large's card still described the ik runtime, and the new
endpoint had no card at all. Both fixed, with a loopback probe -- the checker
runs on Dankclaw, which is also what makes the card green-able.
Dashboard: the endpoint picker was sourced from a vLLM-only metric, so a
llama.cpp job could never be selected, and the prose named frank-large as the
llama.cpp endpoint. The picker now matches both runtimes' series and the
llama.cpp targets carry the job filter every other panel already used.
The seams assert the new contract including the ABSENCE of a 7770 target, so a
well-meaning edit cannot re-add a permanently-red probe.
Dankclaw's endpoints are re-split. frank-large is the halogen-flash-server
quadlet again -- the 2026-09-13 unit file was never touched by the two-day
ik_llama.cpp interlude, so the runtime was still in the repo and its image is
still in local storage -- retuned to the shape asked for: HALOGEN_CTX 200192
with a 400,384-position pool and two slots, exactly two 200k conversations.
frank-small is new: mainline llama.cpp on the RTX 3090 serving
ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF at IQ3_S, using the -mtp build (it carries
blk.64.nextn.*, which is what lets --spec-type draft-mtp run on the main
model's own weights instead of a second 12 GiB copy) plus the BF16 vision
projector, as one 131,072-token slot with f16 KV on port 7771.
The host is shared now, and that is what the halogen retune pays for:
HALOGEN_MAX_TOK 24576 (arena 20.6 -> 16.4 GiB, ~4-5% prefill) and the vision
tower dropped (1.97 GiB) hand ~6 GiB back to the host, and the reserve rises to
20 to keep the fit check honest. Vision moved wholesale to frank-small.
Retired to scripts/.AGENTTRASH/: the ik trio (env, service, serve script), the
Qwen-Sharp template only that runtime read, and four benchmark harnesses bound
to retired runtimes. Because retiring a file makes any test that greps it pass
by absence, the seams assert the archive exists AND the live path does not.
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 vault is the project's source of truth, so a link to a page that does not
exist is a promise the repo cannot keep. Three were dangling:
- Dankclaw/Gitea.md pointed twice at dankclaw/compose.yaml — **which this
session retired**. The clean cutover obligation from my own change: the page
now describes the unit that publishes 3000 and the canonical Caddy unit, and
records why the compose file is gone.
- Dankclaw/Hermes-Dashboard.md linked [[LAN DNS]]; the page is [[LAN-DNS]].
- LLM/frank-medium-radiance-mxfp4.md linked [[Observability on Dankclaw]]; the
page is [[Observability]].
scripts/check-vault-links.py + a seam keep it that way. The checker models
Obsidian's rules, which took three corrections to get right — and each was a
false positive that would have sent me editing healthy docs:
1. Wikilinks are case-insensitive. A case-sensitive matcher reported 45
breaks; 39 were `[[qBittorrent]]` vs qbittorrent.md.
2. `[[folder/Note]]` resolves by path suffix, not by stem.
3. `%20` in a markdown link is URL-encoding, not a filename.
Validating the linter against the resolver it models is the prerequisite for
trusting any of its output — the same discipline that caught a bad assertion of
my own earlier tonight.
Two gaps behind the same near-miss.
1. **No spec covered hermes.franksdank.cloud** — the one guarded vhost whose
upstream is a host address (`reverse_proxy 192.168.0.143:8787`) rather than a
container name, because its service is host-networked. That is how a
loopback-only bind could take the vhost down with a 502 and leave every gate
green. tests/e2e/specs/17-hermes-vhost.spec.ts asserts what a dead upstream
violates: no 5xx through the guard chain, no Caddy error page, and no app
bytes to an unauthenticated raw client. It does not assert SSO-silence, since
this app has its own password login.
2. **Specs are matched by number prefix, not globbed.** A spec file whose prefix
is in no project silently never runs — which is exactly what happened to the
new one until it was registered. The prefix is registered now, the comment in
playwright.config.ts says why, and tests/e2e_scaffold.bats fails if any
spec file matches no project.
The hermes-webui seam assertion is corrected too: it asserted the loopback bind
I wrongly imposed, and now asserts the real contract — the unit's bind must serve
the address the Caddyfile fronts it on.
Two things, found while checking whether the hermes trio still needed migrating.
1. **The phone-facing webui was exposed to the LAN.** Its unit runs with
Network=host, so there is no Podman port forwarder and the app's own bind is
the exposure. The compose service it replaced published
`127.0.0.1:8787:8787` (loopback); the unit bound `HERMES_WEBUI_HOST=0.0.0.0`,
and the LAN address answered 200 — password-gated, but on every interface,
which is not the documented "SSH tunnel is the sole ingress" posture. It now
binds 127.0.0.1, which serves the tunnel just as well (sshd dials
localhost:8787 from the host). The unit comment claiming "LAN-facing as
before" was wrong about "before", and is corrected.
2. **Dankclaw's compose.yaml is retired.** Auditing ownership showed every
running container on that host reports a PODMAN_SYSTEMD_UNIT label — the
hermes trio's units have owned their containers since 2026-09-12 — so the
three service blocks left in compose.yaml were dead weight that could only
create a duplicate container fighting a unit for a name. deploy_hermes was
already fully unit-based. The file is staged in .AGENTTRASH/; the planner
plans nothing for it, an unknown service on that target now errors instead of
silently no-oping through `podman-compose`, and DANKCLAW_COMPOSE_SERVICES is
empty.
The hermes-webui seam now reads the unit — it read compose, which is exactly how
the bind drifted while the test kept passing against a file nobody ran.
ComfyUI had failed 9,146 times and had been down ~7 hours when this was found:
its container was created 2026-09-15 14:12, BEFORE the GPU declarations were
added to the compose service, and `restart: unless-stopped` kept restarting
that stale container — no /dev/kfd, no /dev/dri, no keep-groups — so it died
every time on `RuntimeError: No HIP GPUs are available`. Its "unit" was a
hand-written ~/.config/systemd/user/comfyui.service that shelled out to
`podman compose up -d`, which is not repo-tracked state and collides by name
with the Quadlet the generator produces.
- dankclaw/comfyui/quadlet/comfyui.container: image comfyui-rocm:gfx1151
(built from Containerfile.comfyui), /dev/kfd + /dev/dri, keep-groups,
the four comfyui-data volumes, loopback-only publish (an unguarded service
is internal-only here; the homepage card probes 127.0.0.1:8188), Restart=
always, WantedBy=default.target.
- the compose service is deleted — one owner per container name.
- deploy_comfyui builds the image, installs the unit, retires the compose-era
unit into ~/.AGENTTRASH, removes the stale container so the unit's own can
take the name, and waits on :8188.
- the healthcheck is a file, because the podman 5.x v1 generator splits
HealthCmd on spaces and an inline `python3 -c "..."` becomes a quoting
puzzle that fails silently.
The comfyui seam now reads the unit instead of compose for devices, command and
groups (and resolves the Containerfile from the deployer's declaration, not
from a directory listing).
Dankserver's node-exporter has been dead since a reboot: `podman ps -a` showed
it `Exited (143)` and Prometheus' `node-dankserver` job has been scraping
nothing. It ran only from `dankserver/compose.yaml`, which is the failure mode
this repository's boot-persistence rule exists for (rootless Podman does not
restart bare containers after the stop that shutdown performs), and the compose
form bound the wildcard address — the unauthenticated-metrics-API-on-every-
interface posture already removed on Dankclaw.
- dankserver/observability/quadlet/node-exporter.container — mirrors the
Dankclaw unit, listening on exactly 127.0.0.1:9100 (host-local probes) and
192.168.0.235:9100 (Prometheus on Dankclaw), with Restart=always and
WantedBy=default.target.
- the compose service is deleted: one owner per container name.
- deploy_observability now installs from "$TARGET/observability/quadlet"; it
hardcoded the Dankclaw path, so a Dankserver unit could not be installed by
the shared dispatcher at all.
- planner: "node-exporter" joins the Dankserver service set, with a path rule
for dankserver/observability/**; the dispatcher's allowlist gains
dankserver:node-exporter.
Seams cover the silent halves: both listen addresses present and the wildcard
absent, the compose service gone, the allowlist entry present, and the planner
mapping the path to the service.
Every measurement behind the frank-medium runbook was taken with scripts that
lived in /tmp on two hosts — reproducible only until the next reboot, and
invisible to anyone reading the repository. This moves the useful four into
scripts/, where this repo already keeps its bench harnesses:
bench-vllm-corpus.py code-shaped corpus from the repo's own sources, because
synthetic random prompts misreport draft acceptance
badly (2.9-3.6 tok/update against ~5.8 on code)
bench-vllm-serve.sh concurrency sweep; encodes the two traps that produced
silent garbage — the tokenizer argument, without which
the client dies resolving "frank-medium" on HF and
reports no numbers at all, and the --ignore-eos
semantics that must not be compared across
bench-turn-latency.py per-turn TTFT for an agent-loop shape; the instrument
that decided the routing policy, and the one that shows
cold-vs-warm prefill directly
bench-llm-soak.py sustained multi-family load; what found the capacity
wall (three 30k-token families, 75% cold re-prefills,
zero failures)
Each header carries its traps and the interpretation; the runbook's Benchmarks
section now points at them instead of describing methodology with no tooling.
Also adds the missing half of the script seam: scripts/*.py are compiled, not
just scripts/*.sh syntax-checked — a harness with a syntax error could otherwise
ship unnoticed until someone needed it during an incident.
Both python harnesses were smoke-tested against the live fleet before commit:
the corpus builder wrote 15 prompts, and the turn harness measured 12.5 s cold
against 1.4 s warm on the same prompt — the cache behaviour the runbook claims.
This test failed on a clean tree for many sessions, and the working belief
became "test 73 is a known failure, ignore it" — which is exactly what a
permanently red suite teaches. The cause was a selector bug: `find
dankclaw -name 'Containerfile*' | head -1` returned whichever Containerfile the
directory listing happened to put first (dankclaw/alloy/Containerfile), so the
assertion read a file that never claimed to be ComfyUI's. It would equally have
passed on a wrong file.
The test now resolves the Containerfile the way the build does — build.context
joined with build.dockerfile, both read from dankclaw/compose.yaml — so it
checks the file the deploy actually builds (dankclaw/Containerfile.comfyui, the
one compose, deploy-remote.sh and the ComfyUI doc all name) and follows a future
rename instead of guessing.
Suite: ALL TESTS PASSED (310), no exceptions to explain away.
Frank