Every comment that invoked a 'law' (50 word-boundary sites across 28
tracked files) now states what is going on and why, in terms that
transfer to any project: gate twins drift until one side greenlights
what the other refuses; a tag re-points while a digest pins; a
restrictive engine behavior belongs to the runtime that imposed it and
must be re-tested, not inherited; a speculative head is tensors in the
file, not a flag; snapshot links dangle where the container resolves
them; exit 0 is a clean stop to systemd, so a self-exiting daemon on
on-failure goes dark reporting success. Event narratives and dates are
gone from these comments; the mechanics carry the argument.
Behavior-identical: bash -n, py_compile, yaml parse, full bats suite
408/408 green. One symbol rename rides along (stack script local
scale_law -> scale_contract, with its log text).
frank-dragoon's health gate never checked WHO answered :7770 — the
false-green the fleet learned about on 2026-09-26 (a stray probe holding
the port satisfies a bare curl while the unit is stopped). The other two
handlers carried that check as inlined copies; all three now call
assert_unit_owns_port, and dragoon gets the protection it was missing.
The seam follows: the endpoints' text-grep deployer tests are deleted,
because tests/llm_deploy_gates.bats EXECUTES the same handlers end to end
(stub systemctl/podman/sudo/ss/curl) and asserts refusals, restarts, unit
links, the pending marker, and the MainPID hardening. GATE_PREFIX is
exported at each handler for the same reason the serve scripts export it.
The image/.rad/template gates are require_image/require_min_mib/require_file,
and the gates an operator can only reach on the host (GPU nodes, the ttm pages
cap, the run line) are now drivable: FRANK_ARCHON_DEV_KFD, FRANK_ARCHON_DEV_DRI,
FRANK_ARCHON_TTM_SYSFS and FRANK_ARCHON_LOG default to the production paths.
Seven new seam tests EXECUTE the serve script against fixtures (stub podman,
stub nodes, stub sysfs, temp payload) and assert exit status, the refusal
words and the engine argv. The old text-grep gate test is deleted: it pinned
the words of the source, not the behaviour.
Runbook section `2026-10-11 — unquantized KV at 2 x 200,000`: the dtype law
(only bf16|fp8, no K/V split; the QSA block key is dtype-fixed, which is why
bf16 costs 1.89x and not 2x), the pool formula that reproduces both live
boots within 0.1%, the seqs-3-to-2 provenance (the tcclaviger fork's
torch.compile constraint, not radiance's), the boot ledger, and the A/B.
The A/B, fp8 control arm through a transient FRANK_ARCHON_ENV_FILE drop-in:
prefill -29% (4,379 -> 3,126 cold), TTFT at the full window +25% (the 2 x 197k
pair: 110.5 s -> 138.1 s), decode inside the +-3% band on two of three passes,
draft acceptance UP 0.661 -> 0.740. The price is prefill, not decode. Open
call for Frank: keep exact KV, or take the cheap fp8 2 x 200k fit (pool 3,648).
Also corrects two stale index entries (w4dn8 said STAGED, fp8-native said
ACTIVE), adds the worklog entry, and commits the verification tool as
scripts/probe-frank-archon-kv.py — it carries the probe law that cost two
false negatives: radiance answers in reasoning_content, so a chat probe with a
small budget reads as empty content + finish_reason stop on a healthy server.
Tests 368/368.
The KV pool at the fp8 shape backed 386,904 tokens — 1.93 sessions of the
served 200,000 window, so a second full-height conversation preempted to the
host/disk prefix tiers. Moving the cache to bf16 (the engine's only
unquantized rung; `--kv-cache-dtype` takes bf16|fp8 and has no per-tensor
K/V split) doubles what a token costs: 7.3125 -> 14.625 KiB per rank
(kv_attn 26.00 -> 52.00 KiB per 4-token page + kv_qsa_bkey 3.25 -> 6.50).
Pool 3543 -> 6912 MiB (437k tokens, >= 2 x 200,000), and the weights slab
pays for all of it: 26071 -> 22208 MiB, the pair pinned to the measured
card ceiling 29,120 MiB (card 31,856 - 1,710 consumed outside both budgets
- 1,024 free). The resident set that leaves VRAM spills into the pinned host
pool, so 40960 -> 44928 MiB, and the prefix host tier doubles with the entry
size (58.50 -> 117 KiB): 4096 -> 8192 MiB. Pinned ledger ~147 GiB, ttm floor
140000 -> 150000 (cap 200 GiB).
--max-num-seqs 3 -> 2: two slots x the window is the capacity contract, and
the "seqs 2 cannot boot" law is the retired tcclaviger fork's torch.compile
query_start_loc constraint, not radiance's (radiance booted seqs 2 in the
fp8-native era; the 2026-10-06 sweep had 2 and 3 tied inside +-3%). Bonus:
the fused all-reduce is now declared over 2 x 3 = 6 rows, under the 25-row
bound at which the wht6 wire is bit-exact.
Cost, paid twice on this engine: idle KV VRAM is also the expert cache's
spillover (lends 2.69 GiB + 740 MiB of arena), so the pool steals weight
residency from the slab AND the lendable cache. Priors: 2.14 GiB of stolen
weights cost 2.5% decode (MAX_MODEL_LEN 262144), the EVC ladder's other
direction cost 8.9%. Prediction -3..-8% vs the fp8 control (136 t/s at 44.5k,
acceptance 0.7246); the deploy boot ledger and live probes are the referee.
Seams: MAX_SEQS/HOST_POOL/KV_DTYPE/PREFIX_HOST literals follow the shape, and
two new invariants guard it — the KV pool must back seqs x max-model-len at
the declared dtype (an engine hard limit: an over-long request is accepted
then refused as too large to ever fit; the formula reproduces the fp8 boot's
386,904 to within 0.1%), and the VRAM pair must stay inside the ceiling.
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.
Frank