Frank
33eae71d33
All ~173 managed skills read in full and merged, one polished reference page per skill-cluster: - LLM cross-cutting (17 pages): GGUF Compatibility, Llama Cpp Serving Sizing, Llama Cpp Multi-Device Splits, PCIe Link and Atomics, RDNA4 Container Serving, RDNA4 MoE Expert Offload VRAM Budget, vLLM Boot Forensics, vLLM Porting and Compile Triage, LLM Bench Windows, LLM Performance Diagnosis, Model Swap and Rollback, Tcclaviger Fork Ops, Heterogeneous Split Triage, FreeToken Builds + deltas folded into the retired runbooks (GLM DFlash2 port laws, Lucebox dual-R9700, R9V qualification pipeline, FLM pack registration, ik hybrid envelope, frank-medium split rebalance, llama.cpp GGUF preflight, batch-ubatch split section, bench-window D-state/stale-read notes, second-endpoint bring-up). - Architecture (3): Stale Signal Audit, Quadlet Lifecycle, Deploy State Triage. - Operations (6 + index): Remote Job Runner, Payload and Disk Reclaim, Container Host Reachability, Fleet Ops Playbook, Fleet Audit and Posture, SSH and Remote Access. - Infrastructure: Observability Provisioning + Homepage Status Probes; updates to Authentik, Anubis, LAN-DNS (per-client DoH bypass, Porkbun zone ops), Swap Configuration, OpenWebUI, Hermes (pre-existing page preserved and extended). - FrankBook-Pro: ARR-Stack filled (API split, schema-first probing, auth-posture, auth-config trap); qBittorrent E2E verification. - Desktop/Agent/Research: Noctalia and Niri, OMP Harness, Agent Docs and Edits, Command Center Dotfiles, PICO-8 Asset Standards. - Indexes: LLM Cross-Cutting References section, Operations/ and Agent/ index pages, root-index Skill Distillation section, AGENTS.md pointer. - log.md carries the wave plan. check-vault-links.py 0 unresolved (185 pages); ./tests/run.sh 366/366.
143 lines
6.2 KiB
Markdown
143 lines
6.2 KiB
Markdown
---
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type: configuration
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title: Dankclaw Swap Configuration
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description: The host swapfile on Dankclaw — 64 GiB at /swap.img on ext4, fstab-driven via the generated swap.img.swap unit. Covers why it was raised from 8 GiB, the safe resize ordering that avoids an OOM on a host whose MemAvailable is inflated by pinned model weights, and the swappiness caveat.
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tags:
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- dankclaw
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- host
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- memory
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- swap
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timestamp: 2026-09-12
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---
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# Dankclaw Swap Configuration
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**Host:** Dankclaw (192.168.0.143) — **Filesystem:** ext4 on `/dev/nvme0n1p2`
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| Item | Value |
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| --- | --- |
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| Swapfile | `/swap.img` |
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| Size | **64 GiB** (raised from 8 GiB on 2026-09-12) |
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| Filesystem | ext4 — swapfiles fully supported, no btrfs `nocow` handling needed |
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| Allocation | `fallocate` (preallocated, hole-free; 530 extents) |
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| Persistence | `/etc/fstab` line 12: `/swap.img none swap sw 0 0` |
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| systemd unit | `swap.img.swap` — `loaded (/etc/fstab; generated)`, `active` |
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| `vm.swappiness` | `60` (distro default, unchanged) |
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| zswap | disabled (`/sys/module/zswap/parameters/enabled` = `N`) |
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| Free on `/` after | 748 GiB of 1.9 TiB |
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The unit is **generated from fstab**, not a hand-written unit file. fstab is the
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only control point; `systemctl daemon-reload` re-reads it. Nothing in this
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repository references the swapfile — it is host-level state, documented here so
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it is not invisible.
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## Why 64 GiB
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Dankclaw is shared. `frank-large` alone holds **103.5 GiB of the 121.2 GiB**
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host (`68.0 weights + 14.4 KV pool + 21.1 working`), leaving roughly
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**7.1 GiB** for 28 co-tenant containers whose working set is ~4.3 GiB. The
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engine itself warns that when that runs out, frank-large and its neighbours
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"can stall for minutes at a time at full CPU with no disk activity and no
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output". Swap is the valve that turns an OOM kill into slow paging.
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Swap does **not** relieve the pinned-weights problem — see the caveat below.
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It protects the *co-tenants* and buys headroom for burst allocation.
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## The safe resize ordering
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You cannot grow an active swapfile; it must be swapped off first. On a host
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like this, **never `swapoff` before the replacement is online.** The old 8 GiB
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held 4 GiB of live pages, and `MemAvailable` read 73 GiB while only ~5 GiB was
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genuinely free — the pinned model weights are counted as reclaimable page
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cache, so the headline number is a lie by roughly the size of the model
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(see [[halogen-flash-server]]). Swapping off into that apparent space, with
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nothing else to receive the pages, is how you invite the OOM killer.
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The ordering that avoids it — create and enable the new swap **first**, so the
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pages have somewhere to go:
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```bash
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# 1. Preallocate + format + enable the replacement, old swap still live
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sudo fallocate -l 64G /swap2.img
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sudo chmod 600 /swap2.img
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sudo mkswap /swap2.img # also rejects files with holes
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sudo swapon /swap2.img # total swap now 72 GiB
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# 2. Only now drain the old one — pages migrate into /swap2.img, not into RAM
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sudo swapoff /swap.img # took 65 s for 4 GiB
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# 3. Consolidate onto the conventional path so fstab needs no edit
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sudo swapoff /swap2.img # 725 MiB left, trivial
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sudo mkdir -p ~/.AGENTTRASH/20260912-swapfile-8g
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sudo mv /swap.img ~/.AGENTTRASH/20260912-swapfile-8g/swap.img
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sudo mv /swap2.img /swap.img
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sudo swapon /swap.img
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```
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Step 3 is chained tightly because it leaves the host with **zero swap** for a
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few seconds. Do not leave that window open.
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`mkswap` succeeding is itself a check: it refuses swapfiles containing holes,
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so a `fallocate` that produced a sparse file fails here rather than at 3 a.m.
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under memory pressure.
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## Verification
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```bash
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swapon --show=NAME,TYPE,SIZE,USED,PRIO # /swap.img file 64G
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systemctl is-active swap.img.swap # active
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grep swap /etc/fstab # line 12 intact -> boot persistence
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free -h | tail -2 # Swap: 63Gi total
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```
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Then confirm the inference service is unaffected — a completion, not just
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`/health`:
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```bash
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curl -s http://127.0.0.1:7770/v1/chat/completions \
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-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
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-d '{"model":"frank-large","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Reply with exactly: SWAP64-OK"}],"max_tokens":48,"reasoning_effort":"low"}'
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```
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As run 2026-09-12: `finish_reason: stop`, `SWAP64-OK`, 28 containers up,
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frank-large `health=200` throughout.
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## Caveats
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- **Swap cannot help the pinned weights.** frank-large's ~68 GiB of weights are
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held deliberately; paging them is a stall, not a relief. More swap does not
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make the doubled KV pool affordable — see the reserve/pool ceiling in
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[[halogen-flash-server]].
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- **`vm.swappiness=60` is untested against this workload.** Under real
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pressure the kernel will happily page anonymous memory, and frank-large's KV
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pool and working set *are* anonymous. Swapping the KV pool would be far worse
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than the OOM kill it prevents. If the box ever starts thrashing, lowering
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swappiness (or capping the engine's cgroup) is the knob, not more swap.
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- **`free` still lies after the change.** `MemAvailable` reads ~70 GiB while
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the model is loaded. Trust the engine's `host memory left for everything
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else` line, not `free`.
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- **Filesystem prerequisite (other hosts).** ext4 and xfs take swapfiles
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directly. btrfs needs `chattr +C` (NOCOW), no compression, and no
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snapshots in the swapfile path — check `df -T` before planning, or
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`mkswap` will reject the file.
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- **Renaming an *active* swapfile works (inode-based) but leaves a stale
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path in `/proc/swaps`** — swap it off first, then rename, then `swapon`
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(which is exactly what the step-3 consolidation does). Migration is
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observable while it runs: in the 2026-09-12 run `swapoff` of 4 GiB took
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65 s and used-RAM rose only ~3 GiB (pages touched during migration), the
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rest relocating on disk. If used-RAM climbs toward the whole swapped
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amount, let it finish rather than aborting.
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## Trash
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The previous 8 GiB `/swap.img` (dated 2026-07-21) is staged, not deleted, at
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`dankclaw:~/.AGENTTRASH/20260912-swapfile-8g/swap.img` (8.1 GiB). Purge
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only on explicit approval.
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## See Also
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- [[halogen-flash-server]] — the memory model that motivated this
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- [[Dankclaw System Specs]] — the Strix Halo box
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- [[Dankclaw Improvements]] — other host-level changes
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