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).
Frank