# frank-dragoon — halogen-flash-server 0.16.2, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next v2 NATIVE abliterated (Dankclaw, Strix Halo iGPU)

**ACTIVE since 2026-10-17.** Rollback = revert the swap commit and redeploy
(`scripts/frank-dragoon.env`, `scripts/serve-frank-dragoon.sh`,
`scripts/frank-dragoon.service`); the Swift1.5 payload stays on disk at
`/home/dank/models/halogen-flashnext-v2/` (its fetch script
`scripts/download-frank-dragoon-flashnext.sh` stays the door back), and the
27B-era payload beside that at `/home/dank/models/halogen-qwen3.8-27b/`.
Era write-up: [[frank-dragoon-flash-server-v2-swift15]].

## Why this payload

Frank's ask: serve
`https://huggingface.co/Quat3rnion/halogen-qwen3.8-flash-next-v2-abliterated`
with the card's recommended settings, and **save memory**.

This is the **native 2026-10-11 v2 conversion** of orcarouter's pinned BF16
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, abliterated — the base itself, converted straight into
the v2 `.hgn` format. It is **not** the writer transplant that carried this
filename before: the artifact measures **66,687,678,432 B** where the
Swift1.5 r2 measured 66,687,678,464 B — 32 bytes apart, same filename
family, different model. Byte counts and the Hub LFS sha256 are the only way
to tell them apart, which is why the fetch script and both gates check them.

What the swap buys, measured (table below): retrieval at depth, decode,
prefill, and **7.4 GiB of RAM handed back**. What it costs: the Swift1.5
finetune's compressed reasoning and its small perplexity edge.

## The companion law (the reason this swap needed a referee)

The release publishes **only the main file**. The n-gram lookup table
(REQUIRED — the engine reads it beside the checkpoint), the vision tower,
and the tokenizer are peonist's, and the card does **not** establish them as
interchangeable with this native conversion. No source-matched pair is
published anywhere, so the only available companions are the stock ones.

They are **hardlinked** out of the verified Swift1.5 payload directory
(`scripts/download-frank-dragoon-v2abl.sh`): a hardlink is a regular file, so
it satisfies the serve gate's no-symlink law, and it costs no disk and no
copy next to a 62 GB payload. The engine's own checkpoint tools are the
referee, and they answered: **NIAH 18/18** (vs 17/18 for the payload those
files were published with), needle retrieval exact at both depths, the red-PNG
vision probe exact, perplexity in the normal band. A wrong PLE table does not
whisper — see Verification.

## The payload — one new file, three inherited ones

`/home/dank/models/halogen-v2-abliterated/`, fetched by
`scripts/download-frank-dragoon-v2abl.sh` (`-f` + exact byte counts + LFS
sha256 + `--verify-only`; no token on the command line):

|File|Bytes|sha256|Source|
|---|---|---|---|
|`qwen38-flash-next-v2-abliterated.hgn`|66,687,678,432|`b5bd925f…`|Quat3rnion `@main`, fetched|
|`qwen38-flash-next-ngram.hgn`|51,200,246,144|`3450acada…`|peonist `@5cc17cea`, **hardlinked**, REQUIRED|
|`qwen38-flash-next-vision.hgn`|897,916,416|`d62e0ae5…`|peonist `@e053f488`, hardlinked, vision ON|
|`tokenizer/` (6 files)| — |`tokenizer.json` LFS|peonist `@e053f488`, hardlinked|

The engine stays **halogen-flash-server 0.16.2**, digest-pinned (the card
tested 0.15.0; 0.16.2 is newer in the same line and is what the v2 format was
qualified on in this fleet):

```
ghcr.io/peonist-ai/halogen-flash-server@sha256:0c61bf84ac22308a53f5d1ca6b86806702d7039e5ebc51cae4c66621b92fe04a
```

## Shape — the card's settings, and the three deliberate deviations

`HALOGEN_CTX=262144` (per-request ceiling), `HALOGEN_KV_SLOTS=2`,
**`HALOGEN_KV_POOL_POSITIONS=262144`** (the card's recommendation, and the
memory saving), `HALOGEN_SPEC_ADAPT=0`, `HALOGEN_MAX_TOK=8192`,
`HALOGEN_MAX_TOKENS_CAP=65536` + `HALOGEN_QUEUE_TIMEOUT=7200` (coupled pair),
sampler `1.0 / 0.95 / 20`, `HALOGEN_WEIGHTS_LOCK=1`,
`HALOGEN_HOST_RESERVE_GIB=20`.

Deviations from the card, each on purpose:

- `HALOGEN_MODEL_ID=frank-dragoon`, not the card's `halogen-v2-abliterated` —
  the fleet naming law (service = unit = served id).
- `HALOGEN_SPEC_ADAPT=0` — the card is silent; this is a measured 0.16.2 law
  (the adaptive default disables the drafter per request and halves decode).
- the sampler values are peonist's engine recipe; Quat3rnion publishes none.

**The pool is one budget, not a partition.** Boot ledger: `listening on
127.0.0.1:8730, 2 slots over ONE 262144-position KV pool, each request up to
262144`. The per-request ceiling is unchanged, so the harness contract
(`contextWindow: 217088`) does not move — what changed is that **two
maximum-length conversations can no longer share the endpoint**. That is
acceptable here because frank-dragoon carries the `slow` (medium-thinking)
role and the `security-reviewer` subagent, not the interactive workhorse
(that is frank-archon).

**Memory ledger** (121.2 GiB unified), from the boot ledger of the live
candidate: `pinned 62.11 GiB in 1 range(s) in 1.6 s (41.0 GB/s)` trunk,
`0.84 GiB` vision tower, `reserving the KV pool, 262144 positions (about
7.2 GiB)`, and the engine's own sum: `memory: 62.9 GiB of weights locked in
RAM (0.8 of them the vision tower's), 7.2 GiB of KV pool, …`. The n-gram
table rides as page cache — `mapped 51.2 GB, NOT pinned (Pin::None)` — which
is exactly why cutting the pool is a *double* saving. FLAGS.md law: **RAM the
pool takes is RAM that table loses**; the 7.4 GiB the smaller pool hands back
is page cache for the 47.68 GiB table that long prompts read.

`HALOGEN_FLASH_PIN_TRUNK=0` is **rejected by the v2 loader** — the trunk
stays pinned. Disk-backing the weights is not a lever on this format.

## Measured A/B — same battery, both boots (2026-10-17)

Behavior probes ran against the live service (tagged `swift15` / `v2abl`);
the engine tools ran with the service **stopped**, per the fleet benchmarking
law, under one identical knob set (`scripts/census-frank-dragoon.sh`).

|Probe|Swift1.5 r2 (out)|native v2 (in)|
|---|---|---|
|`verify` on the file|—|OK|
|NIAH 18 cases (4k/32k × 3 depths × 3 positions)|17/18 (94.4 %)|**18/18 (100 %)**|
|wikitext-2 PPL (297,053 ids, 2 × 262,144 seqs)|**3.8772**|3.9679 (+2.3 %)|
|KL of the new model against the old model's logits|—|mean 0.155 / median 0.057, top-1 85.1 %|
|refusal census (5 hostile prompts)|0/5 refusing|0/5 refusing|
|thinking tokens, mean of 6 questions (temp 1.0)|**784**|1,476 (×1.9)|
|tool call, 1-turn / 2-turn|`{"city": "Seattle"}` / answer|`{"city": "Seattle"}` / answer|
|vision (512 px solid red, `image_url` part)|Red|Red|
|needle @21,568 tokens, planted 0.85 / 0.10|hit / hit|hit / hit|
|decode, greedy, 512 tokens|46.8 t/s (spread 25.6–46.8)|50.0 t/s (steady 50.0/50.2)|
|prefill, cold, 59,024 tokens|1,424.8 t/s|**1,604.3 t/s (+12.6 %)**|
|prompt-cache ratio (same prompt, second pass)|136.7×|131.6×|
|KV pool|14.6 GiB (524,288 positions)|**7.2 GiB (262,144)**|

Read the KL honestly: it is a **model-vs-model** divergence, not the
quant-vs-source comparison the tool was built for. Two different models on
the same text *should* differ; median 0.057 with 85 % top-1 agreement is the
signature of two sound models that disagree on content, and the worst rows
are date/name completions. A n-gram table mismatched to the checkpoint
corrupts the forward pass and shows up as elevated KL **everywhere** plus
degraded retrieval — which NIAH (18/18) and the needle probes rule out.

The decode line needs care: the baseline's own spread was 25.6–46.8 t/s
because its samples were taken while the 62 GB fetch was still streaming into
page cache, and the candidate's **first** sample after the battery's long
prompts read 32.8 before settling at 50.0/50.2. Honest claim: **no decode
regression, plausibly faster**; never quote either single number.

## Verification — how to reproduce

```
# 1. payload: bytes + LFS sha256 + the hardlinked trio
bash scripts/download-frank-dragoon-v2abl.sh --verify-only
# 2. engine tools on a STOPPED service (fleet law: no GPU experiment beside
#    a live endpoint; stop the unit first — mask fails on a relinked unit)
bash scripts/census-frank-dragoon.sh verify    # no GPU, safe while serving
sudo systemctl stop frank-dragoon
bash scripts/census-frank-dragoon.sh ref       # reference dump, old payload
bash scripts/census-frank-dragoon.sh cand      # PPL + KL/top-1 vs that dump
bash scripts/census-frank-dragoon.sh niah-cur  # baseline retrieval
bash scripts/census-frank-dragoon.sh niah-new  # candidate retrieval
# 3. boot the candidate through a transient drop-in, then the battery
bash scripts/trial-frank-dragoon.sh candidate
python3 scripts/battery-frank-dragoon.py v2abl all
bash scripts/trial-frank-dragoon.sh restore    # back onto the repo env
```

The battery needs two staged assets in `/tmp/halogen-eval/` (a 512 px solid
red PNG as base64, `red512.b64`, and the wikitext-2 raw test split,
`wikitext-2-raw-test.txt`). Laws it encodes:

- **the engine bills wikitext at ~4.33 characters/token** — the harness
  chars/4 estimate under-bills by ~8 %, and a prompt over `HALOGEN_CTX` is
  refused with a 400 that names the exact overage (never truncated). Size
  haystacks in characters against a **token** budget.
- the wikitext-2 raw test split as staged joins rows with a **single**
  newline (2,891 lines, zero blank lines), so a blank-line split returns one
  1.29 MB "paragraph" and every budget silently becomes "everything".
- the first request after a boot is a warmup artifact; the battery discards
  it (`warmup` row) and never measures it.
- `ppl`/`niah` **load the model** → stopped service. `verify` reads the file
  back with no GPU and can run while serving.

## Contract (unchanged from the Swift1.5 era)

`reasoning_content` carries the thinking and counts against `max_tokens`
(≥512-token budget on any vision probe or the endpoint looks blind while it
is mid-thought); vision via OpenAI `image_url` content parts only, ≥256 px
probes; `response_format` unsupported; the chat template rejects
`reasoning_effort` outside `xhigh|medium|low` (the `models.yml` fold stays
mandatory); unknown sampling params are a 400; the prompt cache is on by
default, so a warm 100k follow-up costs seconds. See
[[frank-dragoon-flash-server-v2-swift15]] for the engine-flag detail that
carries verbatim, and [[deployment]] for the deploy/health gate.