serverAppConfigs/serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-dragoon-flash-server-v2-native.md

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.