serverAppConfigs/serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/halogen-flash-server.md

---

type: reference title: halogen-flash-server on Dankclaw (frank-large) description: The active frank-large runbook — peonist-ai/halogen-flash-server 0.5.8 serving Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (w4b) on the Dankclaw gfx1151 box: container shape, deployed flags, the memory model, the client contract, and the failure modes worth knowing. tags:

• llm
• halogen
• dankclaw
• frank-large
• strix-halo
• gfx1151
• qwen4exp
• rocm timestamp: 2026-09-12

---

halogen-flash-server on Dankclaw (frank-large)

ACTIVE since 2026-09-11. Replaced the llama.cpp / kingjones30-ROCmFPX STRIX deployment (see kingjones-strix-rocmfp4, now the rollback target). Deployed as a rootless Quadlet container, dankclaw/frank-large/quadlet/frank-large.container, port 7770.

The engine is a from-scratch serving runtime for the Qwen3.8-Flash-Next architecture on AMD's gfx1151 (Strix Halo) — the same silicon this host runs. Upstream's own comparison table measures it at roughly 4x the prefill throughput of the llama.cpp-family runtimes it ships against (EngramHalo.cpp, ROCmFP4, CIRU-IU4) on a 32K prompt, and prefill is most of the wall clock on any prompt with real context. That, not decode, is the reason for the swap.

Shape

One container runs both halves of the stack:

half	port	reachable
engine	8730	container loopback only — unauthenticated, never publish it
OpenAI front-end	8731	published as host 7770

The all mode is upstream's default and the shape a single-container host wants: the front-end talks to the engine over loopback inside the container, so there is one process tree, one log, and one published port.

HALOGEN_MODEL_ID=frank-large sets the id reported at /v1/models, in /health, and in every response body. Requests are never rejected for naming a different model — the server serves whatever asks. Keeping the fleet alias is therefore free, and it means Hermes, the harness config, the OpenWebUI discovery, the services.json probe and the docs needed no rename.

Weights

peonist-ai/halogen-qwen3.8-flash-next (HuggingFace, public and ungated):

file	size	role
qwen38-flash-next-w4b.hgn	115.55 GiB	the checkpoint
qwen38-flash-next-w4b.overlay.hgn	2.31 GiB	quality sidecar — picked up automatically; the engine warns at startup if it is missing
qwen38-flash-next-vision.hgn	0.84 GiB	vision tower (see below)
tokenizer/	~21 MB	flat tokenizer dir; found beside the checkpoint, so no extra mount

HALOGEN_DOWNLOAD fetches the whole repo into the bind mount on first start only — the entrypoint acts only when the checkpoint is absent, so a restart never re-downloads, and huggingface_hub resumes an interrupted pull. The mount must be read-write for this. Roughly 127 GB; on Dankclaw it lands in /home/dank/models/halogen.

overlay-speed.hgn (2.22 GiB) comes along with the repo but is unused: it trades the o_proj calibration for about 2 % of decode, and the quality sidecar is the default for a reason.

Deployed flags

Everything else is configured by environment variable — there is no config file, and the flags are read once at startup. These are the departures from upstream's defaults:

flag	value	why
HALOGEN_MODEL_ID	frank-large	fleet identity; no client rename
HALOGEN_CTX	262144	the model's native context, and what both clients declare
HALOGEN_KV_POOL_POSITIONS	524288	in force — two full-length conversations resident, or four at 131k, 13,312 MiB of KV. Was silently clamped to 262,144 until the reserve below dropped; HALOGEN_KV_POOL_FIT still guards the boot, so read the ledger rather than trusting this column
HALOGEN_KV_SLOTS	3	Concurrency cap — lowered from 4 on 2026-09-12 to the real fleet size. Each slot is 111.0 MiB of O(1) state, so this freed ~111 MiB (held 103.5 → 103.4 GiB). Slots share the ONE pool and oversubscribe it (4 × 262144 > 524288), so admission was always pool-bound: at most two full-length conversations, or four at 131k. This trims simultaneous requests, not how much context fits
HALOGEN_MAX_TOK	32768	upstream's default, kept. The arena is 20.6 GiB here against 12.2 at 16384; it only fits alongside the doubled pool because the reserve dropped to 15. At 65536 the arena alone exceeds the budget and the server will not boot
HALOGEN_HOST_RESERVE_GIB	15	lowered from 24 (vendor default 20) on 2026-09-12 to buy both features. The only term you own in the device budget (24 → 29.5 GiB, 15 → 38.5 GiB), and the ceiling for the doubled pool at max_tok=32768 is 16 — the engine needs budget ≥ 36.5, and 18 gives 35.5, which silently re-clamps the pool. Matched pair with the pool. It is not an allocation: raising it cannot return memory to the host, only take the pool away
HALOGEN_VISION_TOWER	1	image input; the fleet's only image path since frank-npu was retired. Charges 1.97 GiB against the budget — the term missing from my first estimate
HALOGEN_DOWNLOAD	peonist-ai/halogen-qwen3.8-flash-next	first-start fetch
HALOGEN_VERBOSE	1	verbose engine logging — the fullest startup account, on permanently so an incident report needs no restart-into-debug

Everything else is upstream's default, deliberately: prompt cache mode 2 (two entries per conversation — end-of-system-prompt and end-of-history — which already covers the shared-prefix case), HALOGEN_CACHE_INPLACE=1 (the snapshot stays ~115 MiB at any depth), the speculative drafter 1 (byte-identical at temperature 0, and it stands down whenever a second conversation is generating), the quality sidecar, HALOGEN_ADMIT_CHUNK=0 (a non-zero value gives up the byte-identity property), and the default HALOGEN_MAX_TOKENS_CAP=65536.

Memory model

Three numbers explain the whole box:

• ~68 GiB pinned weights. The checkpoint is mapped and registered with the GPU in place, never copied. The kernel counts the locked pages as reclaimable file cache, so free, MemAvailable and every dashboard built on them overstate free memory by the size of the model. The server prints the corrected figure at startup; believe that line, not Grafana.
• ~28 KiB per KV position (measured: 262,144 positions = 6,656 MiB of KV, ~7.2 GiB with block scratch), plus the prefill arena (16.7 GiB at HALOGEN_MAX_TOK=32768, 8.4 GiB at 16384). The engine's device-side budget stops at roughly 47 GiB on a 128 GB machine with the weights pinned — and lower on a machine carrying more besides this server, which Dankclaw is.
• HALOGEN_HOST_RESERVE_GIB is what is left for the page cache the lookup table is read through. Too little and long prompts crawl with the disk busy and the process in uninterruptible sleep — that is a cache problem, not a memory problem, and the fix is a smaller pool, not a bigger one.

HALOGEN_KV_POOL_FIT=1 (default) measures that budget at startup and lowers the pool itself if the configured one will not fit, printing what it chose. Read those lines on every restart; they are the ground truth for sizing.

Measured ledger, seven restarts, read live 2026-09-12. The engine's own startup account, including three deliberate experiments:

pool	max_tok	reserve	KV	arena	need	budget	verdict
262144 (baseline)	32768	24	7.2	20.6	29.8	29.5	boots 0.3 over — prints no sizing lines
524288	16384	24	14.4	12.2	28.6	29.5	fits, 0.9 spare
524288	32768	24	14.4	20.6	37.0	29.5	clamped to 262144, deploy still green
524288	65536	24	—	37.3	46.5	29.5	OOM — will not boot
524288	32768	15	14.4	20.6	37.0	38.5	deployed — both features
524288	32768	16	14.4	20.6	37.0	37.5	fits, footprint unchanged — see the ceiling below

The sizing rule

One budget covers the pool, the arena and the vision tower together:

device budget = host RAM - resident weights - HALOGEN_HOST_RESERVE_GIB
              = 121.2    - 67.7             - reserve
                                    reserve 24 -> 29.5 GiB
                                    reserve 15 -> 38.5 GiB

need = KV (28 KiB/position) + arena + vision (1.97 measured)
arena = 3.80 GiB + 8.40 GiB x (HALOGEN_MAX_TOK / 16384)

The 121 the engine prints is rounded down from MemTotal 127104060 kB = 121.2159 GiB, so subtracting the displayed figures gives 29.3 rather than 29.5. Use the unrounded value. Two of the three terms are fixed hardware and checkpoint facts; HALOGEN_HOST_RESERVE_GIB is the only one you own — which buys the fit margin, not the host's memory. It is a term in this inequality, not an allocation, and the section at the end of this page shows the live test that proves it.

Trust the engine's printed requirement over this model wherever they disagree: a boot clamped at reserve 24 stated 524288 positions need ~35.0 GiB (plus 1.5 of margin), i.e. budget >= 36.5, against a modelled 37.0 here. Close enough to plan with, and the authoritative number to cut the other way.

The arena term is linear in HALOGEN_MAX_TOK and predicts every measured point to 0.1 GiB — including upstream's three published "on the device" figures (524,288 → ~35, 786,432 → ~42, 1,048,576 at max_tok=16384 → ~41), which are pool + arena totals at the default max_tok, not pool alone. That is why their largest pool "needs HALOGEN_MAX_TOK=16384": at 32768 a 1M pool would be 49.4. Reading those figures as pool-only is the trap that makes a doubling look affordable when it is not.

At the baseline reserve of 24 the doubled pool leaves 29.5 - 1.97 - 14.4 = 13.1 for the arena, so max_tok <= 18,130 and 16384 is that reserve's ceiling, not a conservative setting. The corner check agrees: at 32768 only 7.0 GiB is left for the KV, ~254k positions, and the pool drops back toward 262144. Cut the reserve to 15 and the same arithmetic gives 38.5 - 1.97 - 14.4 = 22.1 for the arena — max_tok <= 35,700, which is exactly why 32768 now fits unmodified.

What the reserve actually costs

The device budget is not the whole story. Freeing the doubled pool by cutting the reserve moves the machine's memory position considerably:

config	held	host left	contiguous 2 MiB blocks
262144 / 32768, reserve 24	96.3	12.1 GiB	2081
524288 / 16384, reserve 24	94.6	13.8 GiB	3742
524288 / 32768, reserve 15	103.5	7.1 GiB	310
524288 / 32768, reserve 16	103.5	7.1 GiB	293

At the deployed setting the server holds 103.5 of 121 GiB and the engine now volunteers a note it did not print before:

halogen: NOTE this server now holds most of the machine, and 310 contiguous
2 MiB blocks remain. It runs best on a host of its own. If other large
processes share this machine they will compete for what is left, and when it
runs out BOTH they and this server can stall for minutes at a time at full
CPU with no disk activity and no output, which is not a crash and needs no
restart.

That is the failure mode to watch, and it is the least diagnosable of the three: not a silent clamp, not a boot refusal, but a minutes-long freeze that looks like a hang, for the neighbours as much as for frank-large. free is useless for spotting it — MemAvailable still reads ~74 GiB because the page cache counts as reclaimable. Watch the host memory left for everything else line and the contiguous-block count at boot instead.

28 co-tenant containers (~4.3 GiB working set) stayed up through the change, so it is survivable.

The reserve cannot buy air — ceiling 16

The last row above is the experiment that proves it. Raising the reserve from 15 to 16 left held and host left byte-for-byte identical (103.5 / 7.1 GiB). HALOGEN_HOST_RESERVE_GIB feeds the fit-check budget and is not an allocation; the actual footprint is weights + KV + arena + vision, none of which the reserve touches. So the knob has exactly two regimes:

reserve	budget	vs required 36.5	effect
15	38.5	+2.0	deployed
16	37.5	+1.0	no change to footprint, thinner margin — pointless
17	36.5	+0.02	knife edge, inside the noise of the 67.7 term
18	35.5	−1.0	clamps the pool to 262144
24	29.5	−7.0	clamps the pool to 262144

The 36.5 requirement is the engine's own, read from a clamped boot: 524288 positions need ~35.0 GiB (plus 1.5 of margin). Above 16 the only thing a bigger reserve can do is take the doubling away.

To actually free host memory, change the pool or the arena, and the reserve then becomes free to rise: HALOGEN_KV_POOL_POSITIONS=262144 hands back 7.2 GiB, HALOGEN_MAX_TOK=16384 hands back 8.4. Both are one-line edits that the fit check will confirm on the next boot.

The WARNING line only appears when the fit check had to move

This one cost me a wrong conclusion, so it is worth stating plainly. When the configured pool already fits, the engine reserves it and prints nothing — the 09-11 baseline boot goes straight from the pre-flight line to checkpoint: mapped with no kv pool: sizing block at all. The sizing block and its WARNING even 262144 positions ... host RAM cannot spare it appear only after a clamp.

So the absence of a warning in old logs is not evidence of headroom. Both 262144/32768 rows above need 29.8 against a 29.5 budget — 0.27 over — and the baseline has lived in that state since it was deployed without incident, because the 24 GiB reserve is itself generous (the host reports 12–14 GiB free at that point). The engine's budget is a conservative floor, not a hard wall.

Two failure modes, and only one is dangerous

Raising max_tok past the ceiling does not shrink the pool — the arena alone outgrows the budget, and the server cannot allocate at all:

kv pool: 524288 positions need ~51.7 GiB ... LOWERING THE POOL TO 262144 (~44.5 GiB).
kv pool: WARNING even 262144 positions (the context, the smallest pool that can
         serve one request) needs ~44.5 GiB and host RAM cannot spare it.
dmalloc: FAILED requesting 0.250 GiB after 39.970 GiB in 566 allocations (out of memory)

This is the quiet one: the unit stays active, the container reports Up (starting), and deploy.sh sits in its health wait for the whole LLM_WAIT rather than failing fast. It confirms upstream's warning that a large HALOGEN_MAX_TOK means "the server will not start", not "it will be slower".

Under-running the ceiling is far more benign and far easier to miss. At 524288 with the arena back at 32768, HALOGEN_KV_POOL_FIT lowered the pool and deploy.sh still reported healthy in 12 seconds:

kv pool: 524288 positions need ~35.0 GiB (plus 1.5 of margin) and host
         RAM cannot spare it. LOWERING THE POOL TO 262144 (~27.8 GiB).

A green health check does not mean the pool you asked for is the pool you got — read the kv pool: lines after every restart.

The 47.7 GiB n-gram lookup table is never held in RAM; it is read through the file cache. The 2.0 GiB the firmware carves for the iGPU appears in no /proc/meminfo figure at all.

Co-tenancy. HALOGEN_FLASH_PIN_TRUNK=1 (default) is what the published decode numbers were measured with, and it means this container holds most of the host. If a co-tenant then takes the remainder, both it and the engine can stall for minutes at a time at full CPU with no disk activity and no output. That is documented behaviour, not a crash, and it needs no restart. HALOGEN_FLASH_PIN_TRUNK=0 gives the memory back and costs several times the decode speed — a last resort, not a tuning option.

Client contract

The differences from llama.cpp that bite are all in the request, not the deployment:

• No server-side sampler defaults. temperature absent or 0 is greedy decode; above 0 the request samples on the same drafter. Supported fields: temperature, top_p, top_k, min_p, seed, presence_penalty, frequency_penalty, logit_bias, logprobs. Refused with a 400: top_logprobs, logprobs with stream: true, n > 1, and any value outside its defined range (values are refused, never clamped). The fleet runs greedy for clients that stay silent — deterministic, and byte-identical with the drafter.
• The token budget covers thinking. The default is 8192, and a budget that runs out mid-thought returns finish_reason: "length" with an empty content and the partial reasoning in reasoning_content — which most clients do not display. Above the cap (HALOGEN_MAX_TOKENS_CAP, 65536) a request is a 400 rather than a silent truncation. max_tokens, max_completion_tokens and max_output_tokens all work and must agree if more than one is sent.
• reasoning_effort is accepted at the top level and inside chat_template_kwargs: minimal, low, medium, high, xhigh. The model's default is xhigh. minimal aliases the template's low and still reasons; enable_thinking: false turns thinking off; preserve_thinking is honoured. preserve_reasoning is a 400 — it is the llama.cpp-era key.
• /v1/models, /health and completions all report the served id, and reasoning_content carries the reasoning trace.

Pool admission is the one arithmetic trap. A request reserves its prompt plus max_tokens positions when it is admitted; if the pool cannot hold it the request waits in arrival order, and after the queue timeout (3600 s) it gets a 503 engine_busy. A prompt large enough that prompt + budget exceeds the pool can therefore never be admitted at all. With the pool at 524,288 the per-conversation ceiling is HALOGEN_CTX (262,144) — the pool binds how many conversations stay resident, not how long any one of them can be. Under the previous 262,144 pool the two numbers were identical, which is why four concurrent 65k chats were contending for one conversation's worth of positions.

Vision

With the tower loaded, /v1/chat/completions accepts the usual OpenAI image content part carrying a data: URL or bare base64 — http(s) URLs are refused deliberately, because fetching one would make the server issue outbound requests to wherever a client pointed it. One image costs about 2,040 tokens of context and 5.5 / 11.8 / 25.3 s at 1280x800 / 1920x1080 / 2560x1440; text at 12 pt and above is read exactly, and a bigger frame past that point adds empty area rather than detail. Audio and video have no path here at all — that capability left with frank-npu.

Deploy and operate

./scripts/deploy.sh dankclaw --service frank-large

The handler retires the llama.cpp-era root unit first (stops it, drops its enable symlinks, moves /etc/systemd/system/frank-large.service into the home trash — never rm), then pulls ghcr.io/peonist-ai/halogen-flash-server:0.5.8, re-tags it to the localhost/ alias the unit references, installs the Quadlet, and restarts the generated unit. Boot persistence comes from [Install] WantedBy=default.target in the unit file plus linger on the deploy user — generated units cannot be systemctl --user enabled on this host.

The health gate is bootstrap-aware: while the checkpoint is absent the container is downloading and /health cannot answer, so the handler waits for the file instead of burning its budget and reporting a failure that is not one.

systemctl --user status frank-large.service     # the generated unit
podman logs frank-large | head -40              # version banner + memory ledger
curl -s http://127.0.0.1:7770/health            # 200 only after the engine PONGs
curl -s http://127.0.0.1:7770/v1/models

/health asks the engine for a PONG before answering, so a 200 means "ready to serve", not merely "process alive". During the first-start download it stays unhealthy by design.

Troubleshooting

symptom	cause
dmalloc: FAILED requesting … (out of memory) then HIP … out of memory	the KV pool did not fit. HALOGEN_KV_SLOTS will not fix it (slots share the pool); lower HALOGEN_KV_POOL_POSITIONS to 262144, then HALOGEN_MAX_TOK to 16384 (~9 % prefill)
starts, answers short prompts, collapses to a few tok/s on a long one, disk busy, process in uninterruptible sleep	short of file cache, not memory — lower the pool and/or raise HALOGEN_HOST_RESERVE_GIB
long replies that look cut off	read finish_reason: stop means you have the whole answer, length means you ran out of budget (thinking counts)
a request that never returns, then 503 engine_busy	the pool could not reserve prompt + max_tokens; see the admission trap above
both the engine and a co-tenant stall for minutes at full CPU	the pinned-trunk trade; see Memory model
free, MemAvailable, Grafana all wrong by ~68 GiB	expected — locked weights are counted as reclaimable

HALOGEN_VERBOSE=1 ships in the unit, so the fullest startup account is already in the log when something goes wrong. HALOGEN_DMALLOC_LOG is deliberately not set: it logs every allocation over 64 MB, which is steady-state noise on a shared host — raise it only for a live OOM report. The lines worth grepping first:

podman logs frank-large 2>&1 | grep -E '^(dmalloc|kv pool):'

Retrieval: podman logs frank-large covers the current instance only — the Quadlet runs --replace --rm, so everything before the last recreate is gone from the container log. journalctl --user -u frank-large.service is the durable record. Both are rootless: sudo podman logs frank-large looks in root's storage and answers "no such container".

Rollback

The llama.cpp era is intact: the STRIX payload stays at /home/dank/models/kingjones-Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-ROCmFP4-STRIX, the kingjones30/ROCmFPX build stays at /home/dank/GitPackages/kingjones-ROCmFPX/build, and the retired unit, env and serve script are in serverAppConfigs/.AGENTTRASH/ (suffixed .llama.cpp). Rolling back is a git revert of this change set plus a deploy — but the Quadlet unit must be removed from ~/.config/containers/systemd/ first (otherwise the restarted root unit and the still-installed container both claim port 7770). See kingjones-strix-rocmfp4.

The amd_iommu=off kernel argument that came with this change is separate and reverts on its own — see dankclaw-iommu-translation-off.

Citations

• peonist-ai/halogen-flash-server — README, docs/FLAGS.md, deploy/entrypoint.sh, docker-compose.yml, CHANGELOG (v0.5.8)
• peonist-ai/halogen-qwen3.8-flash-next — weights and file inventory
• Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next — base model