Adversarial review of the campaign pipeline. Correctness: rechunk-kld-corpus.py wrote
each window as text and asserted only lengths, so a KLD reference could score a
different token sequence than the corpus holds — every window is now re-encoded and
the tool refuses on mismatch; make-calib-corpus.py no longer crashes on a .json that
is not a content-keyed JSONL, and its KLD cursor advanced by 2 per fragment (half the
pool unused). Silent waste: calib-push.py now aborts when the tap sealed nothing or
no prompt was accepted, instead of re-pushing 10M tokens per round; div-by-zero gone,
served model id parameterised. Races: run-qwen38-bf16.sh restore() removes the rig
container before starting production (today's orphan held the GPUs while the service
reported active), the calib tap dir is proven writable, the score ro-guard resolves
paths; convert-qwen38-w5nl64.sh refuses a missing --arm value, an existing
qwen38-convert-<arm> container, and a zero-exit convert that wrote no artifact.
stack-qwen38-official-fp8.py: bare asserts in verify() (skipped under -O) and a
non-128-lane PLE HD that only warned are hard failures. Speed: fragment token counts
computed once, KLD scored positions accumulated instead of a second full re-encode.
Tests: 576 ok / 0 fail.
PR #81's pool half measured inert the day it deployed: the 66,560 boot printed the
same elastic 26.73 GiB / experts 20.72 / kv cache 5.64 / vram_weights 24.30 as the
49,152 boot and opened the pool with 0 B used, and the qwen38-w5nl64 rig moved
vram_kv 269.99 -> 271.25 MiB (window still 7,436 tokens: its 95.37 GiB n-gram table
claim decides, not the pool). The step half stays. Tests: 576 ok / 0 fail.
frank-archon.env: HOST_POOL_MIB 49,152 -> 66,560 a rank (tp x 65 GiB against the
246 GiB the box has), and the TTM pair 162,000/204,800 -> 197,000/224,000 — the
floor the bats ledger formula computes at the new pool. The pool is the KV lever
under the budget resolver: every MiB pinned in host RAM lowers the expert floor on
the card one-for-one and the cache takes it.
scripts/run-qwen38-bf16.sh: the campaign's private FRANK_QWEN38_MNBT (1,024) is
gone — MNBT now comes from FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_BATCHED_TOKENS, production's 2,048 and
the widest step the quantised expert file tiers stream. That 1,024 was PR #80's
answer to a starved cache; the pool is the fix, a narrow step was the symptom's
disguise, and a per-mode literal measures a shape nothing serves.
tests: frank_archon_unit greps the new pool value; qwen38_reference's SHAPE fixture
carries it, and the two MNBT-override tests become the inheritance assertion (every
mode's argv quotes the value the env file owns) plus the calib assertions.
vault: the shape block moves to the new numbers and the Eras table gains the row for
the era this replaces. The 2026-10-20 boot-ledger line stays as the old era's record
until the new boot's ledger replaces it.
The calibration mode kept a private step (8 seats at MNBT 65,536) that it
called "free throughput". The step's activation arena is billed to the card,
so the wide step cost the container its own expert slab and KV: at 65,536
the arena is 10.65 GiB and the claim falls to 16.85 GiB (weights 14.24 GiB
in VRAM, 56.24 GiB stranded on disk, KV 271 MiB for 8 seats), and the boot
dies with "startup stopped: out of memory" (measured 2026-10-29, while the
kldref boot at MNBT 1,024 — arena 504 MiB, claimable 30.87 GiB — had just
recorded for 16 hours without fault).
Every mode now takes its seat count from FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_SEQS, the file that
owns it, exactly as PR #77 established for the card split, and its step from
FRANK_QWEN38_MNBT. The per-mode literals in kldref and score follow, so one
number defines the geometry for all three. The test that pinned the old
exemption is re-pinned to the invariant that replaced it.
tests/run.sh: 576/576 green.
The reference rig declared a 32,768-token window while the boot ledger hands it
7,436, so 197 of the 198 inherited documents were too long to score. The engine
warns about the real pool; the flag was the only cited source.
Add scripts/rechunk-kld-corpus.py, which moves document boundaries without
moving tokens: each record is re-cut into windows of at most --max-doc-tokens
(7,168 = 7x1024, the largest whole kilopage under 7,436), and each window gets
its own score_from = len - --score-tail. The reference scores the same token
series at more positions and at a shorter context; the calibration corpus is
untouched, so no quant moves. Writes go through a temp file and the token
counts must match before the output is published.
The rig header now says what the pool actually is, and scripts/test-changed.sh
routes the new script to its own seam instead of the generic syntax fallback.
The rerun after 96c5a06 refused every corpus document again ("document 196 is
8507 tokens and the KV pool holds 7436"), and the boot table shows why the
host-pool change could not have helped: vram_budget.cpp put the container in its
`no lender` branch — elastic 25.56 GiB, experts 25.29 GiB (their plan-fixed
share), kv cache 271.25 MiB — identical at 12,288 and at 49,152 MiB of host
pool. The only supplier left there is the activation arena, and the engine says
so at vram_budget.cpp:117: "lower --max-num-batched-tokens (the arena scales
with it)". The log prices both rungs directly (a 2,048-token step costs 1.08
GiB, a 1,024-token step 504.39 MiB), so the default moves to 1,024: the cache
grows to 866 MiB / 24,300 tokens and scores every one of the 197 documents
(longest 11,970). Calibration keeps its wide 65,536; it was never tied to MNBT.
This also retracts the mechanism 96c5a06 recorded in the header ("the pool buys
KV as well as residency"). Inheriting the env's 49,152 / 96 stays right as
single-source-of-truth, but on this payload the pool is not the cache's supplier.
run-qwen38-bf16.sh carried its own --host-pool-mib 12288 / --gpu-headroom-mib 768,
copied from the w4-era swift15 rig. The engine derives the whole per-card split from
those two numbers, and the KV cache's funding is `elastic - expert_floor` where the
expert floor is a function of the pinned host pool — so the pool buys cache as well
as residency. The first kldref boot got a 270 MiB / 7,436-position pool and the
recorder refused all 197 corpus documents ("document 0 is 10554 tokens and the KV
pool holds 7436"), exiting 1.
The rig now sources FRANK_ARCHON_HOST_POOL_MIB / FRANK_ARCHON_GPU_HEADROOM_MIB from
scripts/frank-archon.env, the file that owns them (49152 / 96), with `:?` guards, and
the header records the law instead of the claim that the pool never touches logits.
tests/qwen38_reference.bats pins the shape verbatim, so its SHAPE contract moves with
it; the suite is green (558 tests).
Two tools the KLD gate depends on.
build-qwen38-bf16-rad.sh converts the checkpoint to a BF16 .rad with NO recipe
line, so every tensor stays bf16 - the reference must not carry the quantization
it is there to measure. It gates before writing 335 GiB: the checkpoint present
and fully verified by the fetcher's own verifier, the peak-disk bill (350,000
MiB: the checkpoint's 343,323 plus margin, because the .rad is built beside it),
an existing output retired to ~/.AGENTTRASH by --force instead of deleted, and
--plan-only before the real convert. --max-ctx 32768 is a declare-time check, not
a weight change: dropped, the resolver is handed the checkpoint's 262,144 window,
which at fp8 cache is 258.8 GiB on a 192 GiB machine.
run-qwen38-bf16.sh serves that container in three modes - kldref (record the
reference logits), score (record an arm's logits against that reference), calib
(open the Gram tap for the imatrix). It drains frank-archon and restores it on
every exit path, and the two logits modes ride ONE step size
(FRANK_QWEN38_MNBT, default 2048) and ONE window (FRANK_QWEN38_MAX_MODEL_LEN,
default 32768) so a reference and an arm cannot be measured at different shapes:
that is the whole validity of the KL number. Four slots over 2,048 matches
frank-archon.env's operating point (MAX_SEQS=4, MAX_BATCHED_TOKENS=2048); the
smaller host pool (12,288 vs 49,152) buys residency, which moves speed, not
logits. calib keeps 65,536 - decode-bound serving, never the gate.
kldref refuses before the drain when the corpus's longest record cannot fit the
declared window (limit = window x 3 chars, the pessimistic tokenizer bound; the
measured corpus is 38,263 chars, 2.6x inside 32,768). It runs on --dry-run too,
so the check is visible before a 20-minute drain is spent. 12 seam tests, each
red-proofed by neutralising the gate it pins.
Frank