---
type: configuration
title: FreeToken frank-default-small Runbook
description: FreeToken v0.1.2 serving Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8 as frank-default-small on Dankserver (RTX 3090).
tags:
  - freetoken
  - dankserver
  - frank-default-small
  - qwen3.6
  - moe
  - fp8
timestamp: 2026-09-02
---

# FreeToken frank-default-small Runbook

The `frank-default-small` service on Dankserver is served by
**FreeToken v0.1.2** — an edge-native MoE serving engine that keeps
expert weights in host RAM with an LRU GPU cache. It replaced the
llama.cpp Tiel-Coder-35B-A3B (UD-Q6_K_XL) deployment on 2026-09-02.

## Model

| Field | Value |
|-------|-------|
| HuggingFace | `Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8` |
| Architecture | `qwen3_5_moe` (Qwen3_5MoeForConditionalGeneration) |
| Quant | modelopt block-fp8 (128×128 `weight_block_size`) |
| Size on disk | 35 GB |
| Path | `/home/dank/models/qwen36-35b-a3b-fp8` |
| Layers | 40 (10 full-attention + 30 GDN/linear-attention) |
| Experts | 256 per layer, 8 used per token |
| KV heads | 2 × 256 dim |
| Context | 262,144 (model max) |

**Important:** This serves base Qwen3.6-35B-A3B weights, not the
Tiel-Coder finetune that was previously served via llama.cpp.

## Runtime

| Field | Value |
|-------|-------|
| Engine | FreeToken v0.1.2 (`ft` CLI) |
| Venv | `/home/dank/freetoken/.venv` (uv-managed CPython 3.12) |
| Dependencies | torch 2.11.0+cu130, flashinfer 0.6.17, apache-tvm-ffi |
| CUDA toolchain | pip-installed nvidia-cuda-nvcc/crt/nvvm/runtime 13.2.86 |
| API | OpenAI-compatible (`/v1/chat/completions`, `/v1/models`) |

## Pool Configuration

The GPU budget (~17.6 GiB after weights + fixed caches) is split
MoE-first between expert residency and KV pages:

| Pool | Size | VRAM | Notes |
|------|------|------|-------|
| MoE cache | 2,048 slots (20%) | 6.0 GiB | LRU expert cache, out of 10,240 total |
| KV cache | 453,005 tokens | 8.6 GiB | ~20 KiB/token (10 attn layers only) |
| Mamba state | 24 slots | 1.4 GiB | Per-sequence GDN state (caps concurrency) |

### Live Resize

KV and MoE can be re-partitioned without restart:

```bash
ft ctl --base-url http://127.0.0.1:7770 cache --kv N --moe M --wait 300
```

- **Growing KV** (shrinking MoE): works live.
- **Shrinking KV** (growing MoE): requires restart (old + new pools
  cannot coexist in VRAM during the swap → OOM).
- The fit check refuses overcommit: if the plan doesn't fit, the old
  cache is retained and serving continues.

### Benchmark Results (2026-09-02)

See [[freetoken-benchmark-sweep]] for the full bs1/bs3/bs4/bs6 sweep
across KV pool sizes 8k–700k.

At the production config (20% residency, bs4):

| Metric | Value |
|--------|-------|
| bs1 decode | ~30 tok/s |
| bs4 aggregate | ~87 tok/s |
| bs4 per-request | ~22 tok/s |
| Prefill (4k) | ~1,130 tok/s |

## Quantization Compatibility

FreeToken v0.1.2 supports these safetensor quants for `qwen3_5_moe`:

| Format | Detection | Works |
|--------|-----------|-------|
| BF16 (no quant config) | default | ✅ (experts too large for 60 GB RAM) |
| modelopt block-fp8 (128×128) | `quant_method: "fp8"` + `weight_block_size` | ✅ (current) |
| NVFP4 (modelopt) | `quant_algo: "NVFP4"` | ✅ (best for VRAM) |
| NVFP4 (compressed-tensors) | 4-bit float, group_size=16, strategy=tensor_group | ✅ |
| Per-tensor FP8 (modelopt) | scalar `weight_scale` | ✅ |
| Per-channel FP8 (compressed-tensors) | `weight_scale: [O, 1]` | ❌ loader bug |
| Quark W8A8 INT8 | per-channel scales | ❌ loader bug |
| GGUF | only `gemma4` arch | ❌ for qwen3_5_moe |

## Files

| File | Purpose |
|------|---------|
| `scripts/serve-frank-small.sh` | Serve script (launches `ft serve`) |
| `scripts/frank-default-small.env` | Tunables (model path, pool sizes) |
| `scripts/frank-default-small.service` | Systemd unit |

## Limitations

- **Model identity**: serves base Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, not Tiel-Coder finetune.
- **JIT compilation**: first startup compiles flashinfer/tvm-ffi kernels
  (~5–15 min cold). Cached afterward in `~/.cache/flashinfer` and
  `~/.cache/tvm-ffi`.
- **CUDA toolchain**: driver-only install (no system CUDA toolkit). The
  venv provides pip-installed nvcc 13.2.86 for JIT compilation. All
  nvidia-cu13 packages must be at the same version.
- **Env var collisions**: never name tunables `TEMP`, `HOST`, or
  `GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE` (HIP runtime reads these).

## Citations

- FreeToken paper: arXiv 2608.16157
- FreeToken PyPI: `freetoken[accel]` v0.1.2
- HuggingFace model: `Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8`