PR #15 corrected the engine's page, the research brief's law bullet and the
warmer's header, but the retired ladder had six more homes: both quadlet files
("6.2-8.0 s… 0.5 ms", "~6-8 s each", "paying the 5.5 s cold decode"),
`scripts/frank-tts-engine.env` (the whole law paragraph and the WARM_TEXT note),
`scripts/frank-tts.env`, the [[Frank TTS]] troubleshooting row that told an
operator to expect ~5.5 s, the research brief's consequences paragraph, and one
test comment.
All re-keyed to what was measured on the deployed container 2026-10-18: the
first synthesis of a freshly registered voice costs 1,883 ms against 1,226-1,283
ms afterwards, so the warm pass buys about 0.6 s — and the reason it exists at
all, which the pages never led with, is that the registry is memory-only: without
the hook every voice name is a 400 until somebody synthesizes. The trial's dated
worklog entry stays as written; the correction points at it.
No behavior change: comments, unit lore and docs only, so no cfhash move and no
image rebuild.
Repo state only: nothing deployed, no host touched, no container started.
- `frank-tts-engine` on Dankclaw: `qwentts.cpp` commit
5916bf7c79dbb4e66fc059cdc507a79a23a28bb4, resident `tts-server`, 1.7 B base
talker Q4_K_M + Q8_0 tokenizer, container port 8880. It is deliberately NOT a
fleet endpoint — `frank-tts` on 7772 is the endpoint consumers address.
- Publishes NOTHING. A host-loopback publish would have been useless to the
façade (netavark DNATs published ports only, so a bridge container cannot
reach a host loopback bind — the shape that 502'd hermes) and would have been
the one LAN-reachable surface of an unauthenticated synthesiser. Both voice
containers sit on one committed quadlet network, `frank-tts-engine.network`
pinned to 10.89.5.0/24 (next free /24 after open-notebook's 10.89.4.0/24), and
peers address the engine by container name. Diagnostics and the deployer's
health gate run inside the netns (`podman exec`, `wait_container_healthy`).
- Cold-voice law honoured in the unit: the first request for a registered voice
decodes its whole reference to snapshot codec state (6.2-8.0 s, first audio
byte 5 530 ms), later ones restore in 0.5 ms, and the registry is memory-only.
`ExecStartPost=-/usr/bin/podman exec frank-tts-engine /app/warm-voices.sh`
with `TimeoutStartSec=900`; the `-` prefix keeps a failed warm from
crash-looping the endpoint under `Restart=always`. It logs cold=/warm= per
voice, so the under-a-second second request is proven on every boot.
- Thread law recorded: `tts-server` has no `--threads`; src/backend.h uses
hardware_concurrency()/2, so a cpuset pin silently changes the thread count.
- Image builds from the pinned commit with the proven line (GGML_BLAS=OFF
forced by this host, every GPU backend off, -j 8, no -DGGML_NATIVE because
ggml defaults to -march=native for the building host). Two stages; the runtime
stage COPYs both the entrypoint and the warmer, because a container that
publishes nothing is reached with `podman exec`, not a port.
- `scripts/download-frank-tts-engine-qwentts.sh` fetches the two GGUFs with byte
and LFS-oid checks (talker 1 219 245 248 B, tokenizer 291 150 624 B); the
deployer gates on --verify-only instead of pulling 1.4 GiB mid-deploy.
- Registered in SERVICE_ORDER, DANKCLAW_SERVICES, the deploy-remote.sh dispatch,
its pre-deploy requirement, deploy.sh's regex, the planner's path map (the
whole `dankclaw/voiceservice/` tree mapped to nothing before this), and
test-changed.sh ABOVE the `dankclaw/*.container` case whose `*` crosses `/`.
- New seam tests/frank_tts_engine.bats (19): the Quadlet generator's own output
for network/publish/boot/warm shape, entrypoint argv driven from the tracked
env file, the warmer against a stub tts-server over a real socket
(registration keys, ref_text absent, late engine, hung synthesis, name
refusal), the fetcher's verifier, the pinned cmake line, and both routing
tables. Suite: 422 passed.
- Vault: [[Frank TTS Engine]] linked from the index; log.md entry for the day.
Frank