# frank-archon.env — radiance (StillDeadcode, Apache-2.0) serving the # PUBLISHER's 4-bit-codebook container of the official Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next # (MODEL_FILE below, fetched by scripts/download-frank-archon-iq4r.sh) on # BOTH R9700s (TP=2), dankserver :7770. # 2026-10-15 PAYLOAD SWAP: the model moved from the in-house w4dn8 conversion # of the Swift1.5 finetune to the engine author's published container # qwen3.8-next-flash-fp8-iq4r-moe.rad (116,322 MiB, sha256-verified at fetch — # the w4dn8 measured 116,416 MiB, so this shape carries over with 94 MiB to # spare). NO argument changed: every number below is the 2026-10-13 shape, # kept verbatim. The swap commit is the rollback (the w4dn8 payload stays on # disk). # # SHAPE (2026-10-13): THREE decode slots x 200,000 tokens, fp8 (quantized) KV, # with the per-card budget spent on resident experts: 25,600 MiB of slab + # 5,120 MiB of pool = 30,720 MiB, inside the 30,969 MiB ceiling the engine's own # budget table allows (card 32,624 MiB, settle floor 209 MiB). The pool is sized # to the contract and nothing more (3 x 200,000 needs 5,063 MiB at fp8; 5,120 # predicts 608,027 tokens, 1.3 % slack), because every MiB taken from the slab # is prefill and TTFT (2026-10-11 A/B: slab -14.8 % cost prefill -29 %, TTFT # +25 % at the full window) while KV beyond the contract buys nothing. # Consequence, deliberate: a FOURTH full-height conversation does not fit this # pair, and the engine refuses it — it never truncates. See the KV block for the # arithmetic and the measured dtype law. The w4dn8 payload is the swap # rollback and keeps its trio under the w4dn8 runbook; the fp8-native payload # that came before it was DELETED from disk 2026-10-15 (Frank's call, to free # the volume for this download — rebuildable via the fetch + build scripts # named in the fp8-native runbook). # # 2026-10-05 cutover from FreeToken (PR #587 ROCm, one card, experts in # pinned host RAM; git tag frank-archon-freetoken-pr587-20261005 is the # pre-cutover state — its unit/env/serve trio and Dockerfile are all in the # tag and rebuildable). Before that: tcclaviger vLLM fork (tag # frank-archon-vllm-shapeG-20261003). # # WHY RADIANCE: the engine is C++/HIP with libr4d kernels built for # gfx1201, drives `podman run` directly from the digest-pinned # stilldeadcode/radiance image (287 MiB; host needs only the amdgpu driver), # and its qwen4exp plugin reads the modelopt FP8 encoding NATIVELY # (`X.weight_scale_inv` is the scale plane — checkpoint.h). The PLE n-gram # table (51B params, 47.7 GiB) is served from pinned host RAM via io_uring # reads — Frank's call: "Native FP8. Experts from ram. Pin the PLE to ram." # THE 4-bit-codebook publisher shape is the DEPLOYED payload since # 2026-10-15. The card's own run line (--host-pool-mib 12288, # --expert-vs-cache-ratio 0.82, seqs 8, spec 3) is the publisher's # suggestion on 32 GB cards; this file's shape is the fleet's measured one. # # PAYLOAD: /home/dank/models/rad/qwen3.8-next-flash-fp8-iq4r-moe.rad — the # official Qwen3.8-Flash-Next bf16 checkpoint rad-converted by the engine's # own author (recipe qwen4exp-w4nl64-i8-hc8m: experts as 4-bit codes into a # 16-level non-uniform codebook after a 128-point Walsh–Hadamard rotation, # GPTQ + 3 coordinate-descent sweeps on a 10M-token calibration, ten # bf16-protected experts per layer, int8 W8A8 trunk + lm_head, fp8 HC # mixtures, PLE n-gram fp8 fixed-scale, MTP head, bf16 vision tower; card KL # 0.0789 all-tokens / top-1 92.85 % vs bf16). Fetched byte-exact + sha256 by # scripts/download-frank-archon-iq4r.sh; the recipe/LICENSE stay in the # staging dir beside it as provenance. ROLLBACK: revert the swap commit — the # in-house qwen4exp-swift15-w4dn8-i8-hc8m.rad (scripts/convert-swift15-w4dn8.sh, # KLD-gated) stays on disk. Behind it, the fp8-native # qwen4exp-fp8-native.rad was DELETED from disk 2026-10-15 (Frank's call, # one-time rm, to free the volume for this payload); rebuild = # scripts/download-frank-archon.sh + scripts/build-frank-archon-rad.sh — a # NO-RECIPE rad-convert copy of the official 131-shard checkpoint under the # descriptor law (no shipped plugin claims (qwen4exp, "fp8"), so the staging # config.json drops quantization_config; per-weight encodings are data, not # the descriptor). # # SERVING FACTS (docs/GUIDE.md, docs/DOCKER.md, compose/flashnext.yaml): # - The HTTP listener binds AFTER the full load (main.cpp: engine.start() # then engine.serve()) — during load the port refuses connections, so a # bare curl /health gate is honest. /health == /ping: 200 JSON while # serving, 503 only while stopping (core/server/admin.cpp:385). # - Reasoning: --reasoning-format defaults to auto, emitting thinking in # `reasoning_content` (config.cpp). Tool calls: the qwen3.8 dialect, from # the chat format. Both need no parser flags. # - Sampling: the OpenAI endpoint accepts temperature, top_p, top_k, min_p, # typical_p, presence_penalty, frequency_penalty, repetition_penalty, # repeat_last_n, chat_template_kwargs, reasoning_effort, # enable_thinking, preserve_thinking (core/server/oai.cpp:194-205) — # models.yml's extraBody set is fully inside it. Unknown params are # refused (400), which is why nothing unverified rides the wire. # - MTP: the .rad carries the model's mtp.* head (the publisher's recipe # names the mtp.fc_hidden/fc_embedding/draft_head rules; card default # depth 3). Served at the depth named by FRANK_ARCHON_SPEC_TOKENS below — # the depth this shape's decode ladder was measured at. # - The fused TP all-reduce is declared over max-num-seqs x # (1 + --num-speculative-tokens) rows; 3 x (1+2) = 9 rows, under the 25-row # exactness bound of the wht6 wire. # Engine pin: Codeberg tag v1.0.13 (commit 53282fa), Docker Hub tag 1.0.13, # index digest below. REJECTED UPGRADE: 1.2.0 (sha256:665775ed1d90de6dbb # 25558e07fc60d20328f1346f96f3c6e00845eb763f01fa, tag 1.2.0, commit # e95d397) was benched 2026-10-06 on this exact shape (fp8-native rad, # vram pair, spec 2, seqs 3, 43.6k greedy probe): decode 29.21 t/s and # draft acceptance 0.7123 vs the 1.0.13 control's 30.08 and 0.7549. # Acceptance on the greedy harness is deterministic (the control # reproduced the recorded 0.755 exactly), so the drop is a real numerics # change — the 1.2.0 MoE weight-rotation change (92b8aaf) is the named # suspect; decode loss tracks the acceptance ratio (0.943 vs 0.945). # The vram-pair translation itself is exact (1.2.0 boot ledger took # vram_weights 25.46 GiB / vram_kv 3.46 GiB per card byte-identical to # the 1.0.13 ledger at EVC 0.82). Re-test 1.2.0+ when the rotation change # is untangled; 1.2.0 also REMOVED --expert-vs-cache-ratio in favour of # the --vram-weights-mib / --vram-kv-mib pair (core/config.cpp) — this # file already uses the pair, which BOTH pins accept (rollback symmetry). FRANK_ARCHON_IMAGE=stilldeadcode/radiance@sha256:4c3f484564bb2872784e46b0a59cbd71becc9c1e746e301a3596ffae253c322e # The .rad container FILE (mounted under /models) and the state dir for the # prefix-cache disk tier (mounted rw at /data). The model dir holds ONLY # .rad files; the raw HF download and its staging dir live beside it and # are never mounted. FRANK_ARCHON_MODEL_DIR=/home/dank/models/rad FRANK_ARCHON_MODEL_FILE=qwen3.8-next-flash-fp8-iq4r-moe.rad FRANK_ARCHON_STATE_DIR=/home/dank/radiance-state # The state dir's tune/ subdirectory holds rad-tune's kernel-selection # cache (the engine's selector reads $RADIANCE_HOME/tune/.tune # at boot; $RADIANCE_HOME defaults to /opt/radiance, in the image, so the # cache must ride a host mount — serve script mounts it, see the runbook's # "Tuning levers"). # Container identity is the SERVICE name (Frank's call, 2026-10-05): one # name across systemctl and podman ps. The runtime changes; the name does # not. The legacy list retires every predecessor identity that could hold # the GPUs or the port. FRANK_ARCHON_CONTAINER=frank-archon FRANK_ARCHON_LEGACY_CONTAINERS="frank-archon-qwen frank-archon-r9v qwen-fp8 glm-probe" # Served model id — Protoss name (wire rename 2026-10-09). The container, # unit, scripts and this file keep the frank-archon name above; only the # alias on the wire moved. Radiance validates the requested model name, so # every client (harness, bench scripts, probes) MUST send this value. FRANK_ARCHON_SERVED_NAME=frank-archon FRANK_ARCHON_PORT=7770 # Frank's chat-template call: froggeric's fixed Qwen3.8 template (the # repo's root chat_template.jinja, vendored here; the checkpoint's own # template is baked into the .rad by rad-convert and this overrides it). # Radiance derives the reasoning/tool-call reply format from it. FRANK_ARCHON_TEMPLATE=/home/dank/serverAppConfigs/scripts/qwen38-froggeric-v22.5.jinja # --- engine shape (the boot ledger arbitrates every number below) --------- # Tensor parallel: BOTH R9700s. The board swap (2026-09-20, ProArt B850 # x8/x8 on root ports) made collectives legal on this host; radiance's TP # wire is libr4d's own, not RCCL. FRANK_ARCHON_TP=2 # Lossy WHT 6-bit wire for large all-reduces (publisher's production choice: # +5.6-6.3% prefill, ~-1.3% 8-stream decode at TP2). min-kb stays the # engine default. FRANK_ARCHON_TP_WIRE=wht6 # Decode slots: THREE, so the served window is a CAPACITY CONTRACT — three # concurrent conversations of --max-model-len fit the KV pool (see the KV # block below). The "seqs 2 cannot boot" law is NOT radiance's: it was the # tcclaviger vLLM fork's torch.compile shape specialization on # query_start_loc (ConstraintViolationError, measured 2026-10-02, retired # with that runtime). Radiance booted seqs 2 at the fp8-native first boot, # and the 2026-10-06 decode sweep measured seqs 2 and 3 statistically tied # (30.9-33.1 t/s, inside the +-3% noise floor) — slot count buys concurrency, # not speed, so a slot costs KV, never decode. # Cost of each extra slot: 110 MiB of per-slot recurrent state inside the KV # pool, and the fused TP all-reduce is declared over seqs x (1 + spec) rows — # 3 x 3 = 9 here, under the 25-row bound at which the wht6 wire stays EXACT # (single-sequence decode and any step of <= 25 rows is bit-exact; only busier # steps are lossy). # The pool is sized to this contract and nothing more (see the KV block): # 3 x 200,000 at fp8 = 5,063 MiB, pool 5,120, and the freed 1,792 MiB went into # the resident expert slab. The trade is explicit and it is Frank's call: # a FOURTH full-height conversation no longer fits (5,120 MiB of pool backs # ~608k tokens; 4 x 200,000 needs 6,601), so a fourth 200k request is refused # as too large to fit — it is NOT squeezed, paged, or truncated. Third-party # traffic that wants four full-height sessions is a --vram-kv-mib change, not # a code change. FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_SEQS=3 # Served window. Native is 262,144; 200,000 is the publisher's production # value (compose) and what models.yml's contextWindow must quote — a longer # prompt is refused by the engine, never truncated. The engine treats # `kv group tokens >= max-model-len` as a HARD limit ("ONE request longer # than N tokens is accepted by the API and then refused as too large to ever # fit — this is a hard limit, not a backing ratio"), so the pool is sized # for seqs x maxlen, not for one sequence. FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_MODEL_LEN=200000 FRANK_ARCHON_PLACEMENT=expert_tiered # Pinned host pool for the expert rows that do not fit VRAM. vram_weights and # this pool serve the per-rank resident set TOGETHER: at the fp8-KV pair # (26071/3543) the ledger showed the VRAM slab filled to 259 KiB of slack, # i.e. the pair was exactly sized. Cutting vram-weights by 3.8 GiB to pay for # the bf16 KV pool SPILLS ~3.8 GiB/rank here, so the pool moves with it — # under-sizing it is a boot failure (36864 refused the boot in the fp8 era). # The boot ledger's coverage line remains the referee, not this arithmetic. FRANK_ARCHON_HOST_POOL_MIB=44928 # VRAM left unclaimed per card (publisher default 96 MiB). FRANK_ARCHON_GPU_HEADROOM_MIB=96 # VRAM split of claimed memory per card, MiB (0 = derive from the card). # THE CEILING, read off this engine's own VRAM-budget table (boot 2026-10-13, # pair 24000/5120): card 32,624 MiB; budgets claimed 29,120; `3.42 GiB is # neither budgeted nor accounted — the driver's context, the activation arena # and --gpu-headroom-mib come out of it; anything past those is throughput on # the floor`; and `card 0 settled at 2.01 GiB free against 209.19 MiB (the # 96.00 MiB --gpu-headroom-mib and 113.19 MiB kept for the static region)`. # So the reserve above the ENGINE's floor is 2,058 - 209 = 1,849 MiB and the # ceiling is 29,120 + 1,849 = 30,969 MiB. The 2026-10-11 bound of 29,120 # ("31,856 - 1,710 outside both budgets - keep 1 GiB free") was MY reserve, not # the engine's; the pair below spends the difference and lands 458 MiB above # the engine's floor. `weights + kv <= 30,969` is the gate. # THE PRICE, and it is paid twice: on this engine idle KV VRAM is ALSO the # expert cache's spillover (`mover: 2275 slots can be lent out of the KV # cache (2.69 GiB)`, `arena: lends 740 MiB while steps are <= 256 tokens`), # so a bigger KV pool steals weight residency from the slab AND from the # lendable cache. Priors on this card/model: stealing 2.14 GiB of weights for # a bigger pool (MAX_MODEL_LEN 262144) cost 2.5% decode; the EVC ladder's # other direction (0.82 -> 0.84, +2.5 GiB weights) cost 8.9%. The 2026-10-11 # exact-KV A/B measured the slab's own price (22208 vs the fp8-era 26071): # prefill -29 %, TTFT at the full window +25 %, decode inside the noise band on # 2 of 3 passes, draft acceptance UP 0.661 -> 0.740. # 2026-10-13 (late): THREE slots, so the pool is cut to the contract (5,120) # and every spare MiB goes to the slab: 22208 -> 24000 (the third slot's # surplus KV), then 24000 -> 25600 (the card's settling slack). The direction # the A/B data points: prefill is slab-limited, KV beyond the contract is not. # The margin is thin by design (608,027 predicted tokens against the 600,000 # contract), so the boot ledger's `backs N sequences all at 200000 tokens at # once` line is the referee for THIS pair and the concurrent probe is its # regression test. # VERDICT on the 25,600 arm (measured 2026-10-13, scripts/probe-frank-archon-kv.py): # the threshold claim is FALSIFIED — the slab is a SLOPE at this end. A-cold # 43.5k single-stream: 22,208 -> 3,397, 24,000 -> 3,290, 25,600 -> 3,584 t/s; # the 3-way 197k arm's aggregate prefill 3,051 -> 3,589 t/s (wall # 193.7 -> 164.5 s). So +1,600 MiB of slab = +8.9 % single-stream and # +17.6 % concurrent, both outside the +-3 % noise floor. The 22,208/24,000 # pair landed inside noise of EACH OTHER, which is what made it read as a # plateau; two points are not a curve. # The cliff that remains is between 25,600 (3,584) and 26,071 (4,379, the # 2026-10-11 fp8 control at seqs 3 / pool 3,543) — +22 % for +471 MiB. At THREE # slots that is only reachable by breaking the ceiling (26,112 + 5,120 = 31,232 # vs 30,969, ~214 MiB above the engine's floor); at TWO slots it is free: # pool 3,072 + slab 27,897 = exactly the ceiling, slab above the cliff. FRANK_ARCHON_VRAM_WEIGHTS_MIB=25600 FRANK_ARCHON_VRAM_KV_MIB=5120 # KV cache QUANTIZED (fp8). This engine's flag takes ONLY bf16|fp8 — there is # ONE kv_dtype for the whole cache, so "exact K, quantized V" (llama.cpp's # --cache-type-k/--cache-type-v pair, which is what frank-zealot runs) is # UNSERVABLE here: the rung below bf16 is fp8 on both halves. # Measured per-rank cost, read out of the boot ledger's group table (fp8 boot # 2026-10-08, bf16 boot 2026-10-11): # kv_attn 13 layers, 4-token blocks, page 26.00 KiB (fp8) -> 52.00 KiB # kv_qsa_bkey 13 layers, 4-token blocks, page 3.25 KiB at BOTH dtypes — # the QSA block key is an index, not attention state, and does # NOT follow --kv-cache-dtype # => 7.3125 KiB/token fp8, 13.8125 KiB/token bf16: bf16 costs 1.89x fp8, # not 2x, precisely because the bkey plane is dtype-fixed. # The dtype-INDEPENDENT terms also live in the pool: kv_gdn_state 54 MiB x 2 # copies per sequence (+ conv/tail/ple ~= 110 MiB a sequence) and the prefix # checkpoint region 8 x 55.99 = 448 MiB. So: # pool_mib >= tokens x 7.3125 KiB + 110 x seqs + 448 # 3 x 200,000 at fp8 needs 4,285 + 330 + 448 = 5,063 MiB; the pool is 5,120, # and it predicts (5120 - 330 - 448) x 1024 / 7.3125 = 608,027 tokens: the # three-slot contract with 1.3 % slack, every MiB above 5,063 having been # handed to the expert slab instead. The ledger line is the referee ("backs N # sequences all at 200000 tokens at once") — a pair this tight is read off the # boot, never assumed. # At bf16 the same three slots cost 8,093 + 778 = 8,871 MiB, which would cut # the slab to 20,249 MiB (-9 %); at FOUR slots bf16 costs 10,791 + 888 = # 11,679 MiB and the slab falls to 17,441 (-33 %). fp8 keeps 22,208 at both # slot counts. The 2026-10-11 bf16 shape (6,912 / seqs 2) backed 462,752 # tokens = 2 x 200,000; the historical fp8 pool of 3,543 gave 386,904 (1.93 # sessions), and the four-slot fp8 boot of 2026-10-13 19:21 backed 843,276. # Secondary saving: the prefix-cache entry shrinks with the attention plane # (one entry 110.50 KiB at bf16 -> 58.50 KiB at fp8, measured on the two boot # ledgers' `kv tier transfer` lines), so the host tier below parks twice as # many conversations as it did at bf16 — no re-size needed to park three slots. FRANK_ARCHON_KV_DTYPE=fp8 # Spec decode: the checkpoint's own MTP head, served at depth 2 — the # publisher's card ships depth 3 as its peak; this fleet's ladder was # measured at 2 and the swap keeps every argument, so 2 stays (rows # 3 x (1+2) = 9, inside the wht6 25-row exactness bound). FRANK_ARCHON_SPEC_TOKENS=2 FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_BATCHED_TOKENS=2048 # Prefix cache tiers (publisher pattern). The host tier is sized in ENTRIES, # and one entry tracks the cache dtype (58.50 KiB at fp8, 117 KiB at bf16, per # the ledger's `kv tier transfer` line): at fp8, 8192 MiB parks ~5.8 sessions # of 200k (at bf16 the same tier parked ~2.9), so four live slots plus a full # parked set fits with the tier as it stands — at RAM the host has (104 GiB # available with the service loaded). FRANK_ARCHON_PREFIX_HOST_MIB=8192 FRANK_ARCHON_PREFIX_DISK_MIB=65536 # Frank's pin law: the PLE n-gram table (47.7 GiB) serves from pinned host # RAM the cards read. `ram` REFUSES the start if the memlock limit is too # small — the unit's LimitMEMLOCK=infinity is the other half of this law. FRANK_ARCHON_NGRAM_PLACEMENT=ram # TTM preflight: the pinned ledger (2 x 44 GiB pools + 47.7 GiB PLE + 8 GiB # prefix host = ~147 GiB) rides TTM's shared pages, capped by ttm's # pages_limit (the current kernel exposes NO pages_max; the cap function # takes the min over the knobs that exist). Below the plan the load dies # mid-pin with an allocator error instead of this named refusal. # THE CAP IS A RUNTIME KNOB — the kernel default is half of RAM, so every # raise dies with a reboot. Measured the hard way: the 2026-10-05 manual raise # to 52,428,800 pages (200 GiB) was gone after the 2026-10-12 23:17 POWER # FAILURE, the cap fell back to 125,988 MiB, and the preflight refused the # start 6,919 times in ~20 h while Restart=always re-ran it. The gate in # scripts/ttm-preflight.sh now RAISES the knob itself before refusing (the # root unit is privileged; the knob is a 0644 root module parameter), so the # recovery is a boot, not a visit to the machine. FRANK_ARCHON_TTM_MIN_MIB=150000 FRANK_ARCHON_TTM_TARGET_MIB=204800 # Escape hatch for boot-ladder experiments. Unset -> no extra argv. Keep # multi-flag values as one string; the serve script expands it unquoted on # purpose. FRANK_ARCHON_EXTRA_ARGS= # The .rad's minimum size in MiB (deployer gate; a truncated fetch is a # guaranteed long-timeout boot instead of a fast failure). The deployed # publisher container measures 116,322 MiB (121,969,901,568 B); the # in-house w4dn8 rollback measured 116,416 MiB. Floor sits just under both. FRANK_ARCHON_RAD_MIN_MIB=110000