serverAppConfigs/serverAppConfigs-docs/log.md

Bundle Change Log

2026-10-01

• frank-primary rolled BACK to Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-Uncensored-FP8 + MTP4; GLM/DFlash2 declared failed and purged. The DFlash2 drafter booted and served (window 6j, 65,536 ctx, glm53-flash on :7773, both TP ranks captured FULL dflash2 cuda graphs — five patches deep: EAGLE3 wrapper interface v5, KV unifier MLA-multiple, kpool tailpin, glm5 KV pool with draft+hidden groups, registry method-signal), but acceptance pinned at 1.00-1.38 on every text class INCLUDING verbatim repetition — a mis-wired aux-hidden-state capture, not a weak drafter. At ~1.2 acceptance the 8-token verify tax put decode at 1.6-1.8 tok/s vs the 9.9-10.0 baseline (5x slower). Frank's independently reported 18 tok/s / ~370 prefill did not originate from this engine (APIServer access log: every completion POST was host-local; his workstation appears once, a /v1/models GET). Restored the verified 37.4-40.6 tok/s arm from the 2339fae trio (200k x 3 seqs, fp8 KV, prefetch off); GLM payload (170 GiB) + drafter (2.2 GiB) + scratch staged to /home/dank/.AGENTTRASH/20261001-glm-purge/. KV-cache patches 02/03/04/04b survive in scripts/patches/ (generic unifier/tailpin/grouping/registry fixes, apply-verified).

2026-09-30

• frank-primary cut over to GLM-5.3-Flash W4A16 int4 — it serves, but NOT at the 35 tok/s target, and the shortfall is measured rather than inferred.
  • Payload Intel/GLM-5.3-Flash-W4A16-AutoRound (AutoRound symmetric int4 group 128, auto_round:auto_gptq packing, ~170 GiB, 34 shards + 2 extras, 113,074 tensors). It is the only W4A16 checkpoint this fork can serve WITH expert offload: its quant_method: auto-round is overridden to inc, which routes the MoE to libr4d's grouped W4A16 GEMM (R4dW4a16MoEMethod). The compressed-tensors W4A16 build of the same model (dealignai/…-CYBERSECURITY-W4A16, 182 GiB, fetched earlier) resolves to TritonWNA16Experts, which has NO offload recipe — and 170 GiB of experts cannot fit 64 GiB of VRAM, so it refused to serve at all. That checkpoint was purged with the other retired payloads.
  • Shape: tcclaviger RDNA4 vLLM fork (same digest-pinned image as the qwen cutover), TP=2, 131,072 ctx x 2 seqs, bf16 KV, util 0.98, NBATCH 2048, --enable-expert-offload --expert-precise-memory, prefix caching, vision + glm47 tool and reasoning parsers, MTP OFF, prefetch OFF.
  • Measured on the deployed engine: decode 9.9-10.0 tok/s, prefill 918 tok/s (warm, 2.6k prompt), KV 138,561 tokens; arena 14.51 GiB = 2,383 slots per rank over 12,096 host-backed experts (73.64 GiB pinned per rank).
  • The wall — and a corrected one. The first account of the shortfall bounded the step with throughput arithmetic (a step moves 0.82 GiB of misses in ~100 ms = "8.2 GB/s effective against a 22.74 GB/s link", needing a 0.89 hit rate for 35 tok/s). A torch-profiler kernel-time window falsified it (496 decode tokens, rank0 trace parsed for device-activity time): 46.18 s of kernel time = ~93 ms/token, of which 44 % is pointwise glue — vectorized_elementwise_kernel alone 16.07 s over 708,500 launches (1,428 per token), plus 3.11 s of elementwise_kernel_manual_unroll — against 1.05 % for r4d_moe_lru_gather_kernel. The MoE GEMM is 10 %, the split-K GEMM 6.4 %, the router/top-k 8.9 %, the mHC kernels 6.5 %, and the inductor fusions that DO happen 6 %. The real cause is that the fork compiles its own Qwen trunk (@support_torch_compile in models/qwen4_exp/amd/model.py) and not its GLM trunk, so every pointwise op is a separate eager kernel; the engine says so at boot ("...provides neither a compiled submodule nor breakable CUDA graphs. Overriding to FULL_DECODE_ONLY."). Growing the arena 13.08 -> 14.51 GiB still changed nothing, consistent with a 1 % gather.
  • Fork work staged (compile changelist, WIP — does not boot yet). scripts/patches/glm53-compile-01-model-decorator.patch, -02-trace-safe-probes.patch, -03-fullgraph-optout.patch, each with its own evidence header and base/patched sha256. Boots established, in order: (1) functools.lru_cache does NOT make a probe trace-safe — dynamo re-traces the wrapped body even when warm, so r4d_mhc_supported -> r4d_mhc_enabled -> available -> os.path.exists breaks the graph (a plain module-global read compiles; verified in-image); (2) suppress_errors does NOT cover graph breaks, only fullgraph=False does; (3) the GLM trunk can never satisfy fullgraph because its indexer metadata syncs to host (glm5next/amd/sparse_indexer.py:263,419), and AOT compile refuses breaks outright. With all three the trunk traces (Dynamo bytecode transform time: 1.08 s) and then dies on KeyError: 'in_proj_qkvbfg_a' in the mHC/KDA path — a latent bug the compile exposes. That is the remaining blocker.
  • No new HIP kernels are possible (the image ships r4d.so with no sources), which binary-blocks the second-largest lever: the fused router is gated num_experts in {128, 256, 512} and only r4d_moe_route_kernel<128|256|512> instantiations exist, while GLM has 288 experts. --kv-cache-dtype fp8 buys no capacity either (the plan's KV reserve is dtype-blind), only removing gfx12's only MLA decode path.
  • DFlash2 for GLM is a target-side port, not a drafter port. incoai/GLM-5.3-Flash-DFlash2 declares architectures: ["DFlash2DraftModel"] and model_type: "qwen3" (5 dense layers, sliding attention, block 8, target_layer_ids [5, 14, 24, 33, 42] of 45) and the fork already maps it (registry.py:636 -> qwen3_dflash2.DFlash2Qwen3ForCausalLM; spec method "dflash"). What glm5next lacks is the target side: aux-hidden-state capture (set_aux_hidden_state_layers / per-layer capture, as deepseek_v2.py demonstrates). No speedup is budgeted: a verification pass pays pointwise cost proportional to its token count.
  • DFlash2 tried, and the gap was exactly that one interface — now closed. Payload fetched and hash-verified (/home/dank/models/GLM-5.3-Flash-DFlash2, 2,342,169,800 B, sha256 b038e1d9… = the Hub's LFS oid). Booting with --speculative-config '{"method":"dflash","model":"/draft","num_speculative_tokens":8}' accepted the config and the drafter and died at worker init with RuntimeError: Model does not support EAGLE3 interface. The port (scripts/patches/glm53-dflash-01-aux-hidden-states.patch) took FIVE versions — hand-written methods -> Protocol base (MRO kill at class creation) -> attrs on the text model -> attrs + methods on the text model -> v5: attrs + methods on BOTH wrappers (the runner checks the LOADED instance, which for GLM is the multimodal Glm5NextForConditionalGeneration holding the text model as self.language_model; pixtral.py:498 is the reference delegation pattern). v5 CLEARS the gate: both TP workers log Using Eagle3 auxiliary layers from config: (6, 15, 25, 34, …) and the DFlash2 drafter resolves + loads. Getting past that point was then interrupted twice by experiment-window RAM contention (see the window discipline below), so the drafter-serving end state was still unproven when this entry was written.
  • Compile work: one confirmed blocker, and a launcher bug that misled four boots. With breaks genuinely tolerated (fullgraph=False, AOT off) the trunk traces and dies on the dynamo name-map KeyError: 'in_proj_qkvbfg_a'. Four later boots reported different fatal breaks — Unsupported: Read uninitialized cell at mla.py:208 (the fused-norm JIT kernel), then Unsupported method call in the indexer's in-forward workspace acquisition (sparse_indexer.py:132 -> workspace.py:135 get_simultaneous / :155 _ensure_workspace_size), then Skip calling torch.compiler.disable()'d function — and the cause was my own scratch launcher: its compile branches were restructured and the -e VLLM_COMPILE_FULLGRAPH=0 line was dropped, so those boots ran fullgraph=True, where every break is an error and the first one wins. I first blamed TORCH_LOGS=graph_breaks for the difference; that was wrong (the flag only logs). The moving reports are still useful — they are the break list — and patch 04 demonstrably removes the first of them (the fused-norm cell), patch 05 makes the workspace acquisition compiler-opaque. scripts/patches/glm53-compile-04-fused-qkv-rmsnorm-optout.patch takes GLM off the fused-norm kernel (R4D_GLM_FUSE_QKV_RMSNORM=0, a constructor flag glm5next sets at attention.py:583).
  • Diagnostics built for this (reusable). TORCH_LOGS=graph_breaks + VLLM_USE_AOT_COMPILE=0 names each break with its user stack (AOT compile hard-refuses breaks outright); /home/dank/dynamo-probe on PYTHONPATH with VLLM_DYNAMO_DUMP_ATTRS=1 prints the dynamo name-map miss detail (node target, near-miss keys, whether another live OutputGraph holds the key). Two gotchas recorded: a .pth on PYTHONPATH is NOT executed (use sitecustomize.py, chaining the image's apport hook), and the scratch launcher used to reset ENVARGS (now ${ENVARGS:-}), which silently dropped env vars and wasted a boot. All four patch artifacts are now genuine diff -u patches, verified to apply to the pinned image and to reproduce their recorded sha256.
  • Measured and rejected: MTP4 (the head loads, arch resolves to Glm5NextMTPModel, acceptance is excellent at mean length 3.76-4.90 — but decode was unchanged (9.6-11.2 vs 10.0) while prefill COLLAPSED 918 -> 255. The profiler window above explains it: the per-token cost is dominated by pointwise glue that scales with the token count, so verifying a draft batch pays ~N x that glue for the same N tokens of output); fp8 KV (disables the sparse MLA backend's rope-free Triton path, and aiter's MLA decode op is gated on CDNA>2, so the MTP draft step demands an op that cannot exist on gfx12); NBATCH 8192 (boots, identical prefill).
  • Fork bug found: the plan's KV reserve under-models this model's per-sequence KDA state and the MTP draft's KV, and gpu_worker caps KV at that reserve, making a legal --max-model-len unbootable. Shipped scripts/patches/gpu_worker-kv-cap.patch (lets an explicit operator KV request raise the cap) — NOT needed by the deployed shape.
  • Rollback: commit 2339fae (qwen FP8 + MTP4); the qwen payload and the R9V state dirs are intact on disk.

2026-09-29

• frank-large tuning investigation: a measured NEGATIVE result, nothing changed. Frank asked for iterative decode/prefill improvement at a 32k working point without touching the model or quantization. No win exists at gufo's served settings, so no config change was shipped. frank-large was stopped for the whole investigation (~4h) per the benchmarking policy and restored healthy in 9s afterwards.
  • Measured on the repo's own prose and shell sources at 32,762 prompt tokens, salted per run so a warm prefix cache could not flatter a later run, 3–5 repetitions per configuration.
  • --prefill-chunk is dead: 512 → 8192 moves prefill 410.7–412.4 t/s. A 16x change in chunk size, 0.4% out.
  • --draft-tokens is flat: 5 → 10 gives 13.79–15.86 t/s decode, all inside the run-to-run noise band. The 5-rep confirmation round reversed the 3-rep leaders — dt9 + chunk4096 looked best and came last (12.86), while the deployed config came first (14.71).
  • --draft-policy fixed vs adaptive: no effect. --min-draft-tokens: rejected by the engine ("DFlash2 requires ... 1"). MTP: unsupported for Q8 targets (Unsupported Qwen MTP tensor type for token_embd.weight: Q8_0).
  • --context 262144 → 40960 was tested as a diagnostic (the deployed value preallocates KV ~8x larger than a 32k conversation needs): no gain (13.93 vs 14.71 t/s), and it would break models.yml's declared contextWindow: 262144. Not shipped.
  • What actually moves the number is speculation itself: 6.65 t/s off → ~15 t/s on, 5.3x — already enabled. Prefill is insensitive to everything tried, consistent with gufo's own EXPERIMENTS.md where dozens of kernel variants are recorded rejected for "no release throughput improvement".
  • Two traps are now in AGENTS.md's benchmarking policy, because they cost most of the wall time and both produced false results: (1) gufo bench cannot rank speculative settings and inverted the ranking — its corpus reports acceptance=0.933 +/- 0.000 with an identical trace sha256 across draft widths (the same highly-predictable text every run, 93% of proposals accepted). It reported 29–37 t/s where real traffic gives ~15, and made dt16 look 6% faster than dt7 when real text made it 14% slower. (2) A live A/B needs >=128 generated tokens; at 8, inter_token is first-token noise and the first pass of the sweep produced a nonsense ordering that the 128-token pass reversed.
  • Also worth recording: the Server-Timing header is ttft;dur=402.485 — the unit is in the name half, so splitting on = keys the dict ttft;dur and every lookup silently returns nothing. Four configurations reported "no Server-Timing" while the header was present on all of them.
• dankserver FP8 decode-tuning campaign: flags exhausted at 26.8 tok/s, mechanism measured. The ad hoc qwen-fp8 container (tcclaviger RDNA4 fork, orcarouter Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-Uncensored-FP8, TP=2) ran a full flag-level A/B battery at the 32k working point; every number is from the server's usage counters (SSE chunks are invalid under spec decode). New runbook: dankserver-qwen38-fp8-expert-offload-tuning.
  • Incumbent stands: MTP depth 4, stock gather 8x16, prefetch depth 1, TUNABLE off — 26.80/25.15/26.81 tok/s at 166/1087/4064 ctx, acceptance 60.7%; the re-check reproduced it (25.80/24.38/26.63).
  • Ruled out by measurement: gather geometry 16x32 (−9%) and 32x64 (parity) — the fork's "tuned at the Gen4 ceiling" comment is stale, the stock constants are already right on Gen5 x8; MTP depth 3 (−9%, flat in ctx) and depth 6 (collapses to 13.5–19, acceptance 17.4% — and proves the UVA read-through path is SLOWER than copy-in); MNBT 8192 (neutral); prefetch depth 2 (neutral — the tier is 16 slots/layer against a ~2,400-slab working set at 73% misses); 2-way concurrency (summed 25.49 < single 26.8 — under TP both streams' misses gather on each rank, the links do not add capacity, and the shared arena thrashes).
  • TunableOp rejected: it silently skips under expert offload unless CLAV_TUNABLEOP_WITH_OFFLOAD=1; once forced on it corrupts numerics — repetition loops, the server's repetition-halt firing at ~140 of 256 tokens, "79.8 tok/s" measured on halted degenerate completions, and a fresh-prompt check at 20.01 (below baseline). +6.7 min warmup, no persistent cache in the container lifecycle.
  • Infeasible: UTIL=0.99 (free-memory wall: 31.29 of 31.86 GiB free at worker init); --max-num-seqs 2 (compile constraint violation at CUDA-graph capture); ngram-only drafter (fork bug: "PLE inputs were not prepared" — PLE prep is wired only for the MTP spec path).
  • The wall, measured: the link does Gen5 x8 = 31.5 GB/s/direction; the HIP probe reads 22.74 GB/s at the exact 2.345 MiB expert slab (91% of ceiling at bulk); the engine's effective gather rate is ~9.5 GB/s = 42% of that. A decode step is ~100 ms compute + ~400 ms PCIe wait (peak util 100%, smooth ~29%). The gap to the 35 tok/s target is the fork's gather read path — fork-patch territory, not flags.
  • Telemetry fork bugs: the torch-profiler worker stop hangs on ROCm (>10 min, two attempts, while the AsyncLLM wrapper logs success in 1 s), and the default torch_profiler_with_stack=true grew a 6.5-min profile window's trace buffer ~40 GB → the kernel OOM-killed the engine core (anon-rss 95.2 GB, oom-kill in journalctl -k). The per-layer expert-cache hit rates (R4D_LRU_TELEMETRY=1) are reachable ONLY through that stop path, so the telemetry JSON is unreachable without a fork patch.
  • 256k ctx boots (the last original-goal dimension): a 262,144-token window needs 4.0 GiB of KV (hybrid attention + mamba pages ≈ 16 KiB/token, not the 32k plan's 9,190 B/token) — 3 GiB boot-refused (4.0 GiB needed > 2.98 available; the engine's own max-len estimate at that pool: 184,224). At KV 4.5 GiB it serves 36.65/34.21/34.77 (arena 6,574→5,648 slots, −14%, ~10% decode cost; 2 of 3 depths just under 35). KV-exact-4.0 arm in flight for the last +3.5% slots. Correction recorded: the planner sizes the arena AFTER the KV override (the earlier "before" reading was wrong) — the arena is what remains.
  • Final 256k probe: the KV trim is inert. KV-exact 4.0 GiB boot-refused by 20 MB of accounting (3.98 available < 4.0 needed; engine estimate at 3.98: max len 260,176); +32 MiB (KV_BYTES= 4328521728) boots — but the arena is identical to the 4.5 GiB arm (5,648 slots): the planner buckets, the 0.47 GiB went to margin. Decode band 36.48/34.13/35.02 (acceptance 39.4%) — same 34.1-36.5 band, straddling the 35 target within noise. Final 256k config: MAXLEN=262144 KV_BYTES=4328521728, prefetch off. The full-speed alternative stays MAXLEN=184224 at 3 GiB (37.4-40.6 band).
  • GLM-5.3-Flash readiness REVISED by source reading (Frank's question about int4 vs mxfp4): the tcclaviger fork in the qwen-fp8 container registers Glm5NextForCausalLM/Glm5NextMTP with a backend-split module (glm5next/amd|common|nvidia, sparse_indexer.py for DSA); offloader/expert.py accepts R4dDsfp4MoEExperts, R4dW4a16MoEExperts, Fp8HipMoEExperts — and R4dDsfp4MoEExperts is MXFP4 weights with the DeepSeek activation law (docstring; SwiGLU gemm1_clamp_limit default 10.0), inheriting the mxfp4 repack/GEMM/emulation-fallback. r4d_lib.has_dsfp4() is True in this build — native moe_dsfp4 / moe_dsfp4_mt1 entries exist, so the old "MXFP4 = emulation, missing kernels" GLM verdict is dead for this fork. WNA16 (int4) backend oracle on ROCm reduces to HUMMING/TRITON (Marlin/TRTLLM/XPU are CUDA/NVIDIA/Intel-only), payload must be compressed-tensors W4A16 group-wise symmetric. Remaining GLM gate: a compressed-tensors MXFP4 (~165 GiB) or W4A16 payload + a glm5next-on-HIP boot probe; community GLM-5.3 quants are GGUF (llama.cpp path only), native FP8 is 328 GB (> 246 GiB RAM). Feasibility doc rows updated.
  • Revert pins installed (Frank's request): (1) repo tag qwen-fp8-tuned-20260929 at f532e03 (the campaign's docs + measured config; git checkout qwen-fp8-tuned-20260929 restores the state); (2) image pinned by digest — serve script now launches docker.io/tcclaviger/vllm@sha256:da402966... (ID 3322dbbbc96d) with a local alias qwen-fp8-runtime:tuned-20260929; the floating :latest is no longer referenced anywhere (the other image on the host, 28.06.1-Code000 = fffca39f, is a DIFFERENT build — do not confuse). Runbook deployment-shape section updated.
  • Endpoint published: PORTMAP=7773:7770 hook added to the serve script; the 256k config relaunched with it. Host-side checks: health 200 on 127.0.0.1:7773 AND 192.168.0.235:7773, /v1/models lists qwen3.8-flash-next, decode through the published path 36.49/34.55/35.98 (same band). 7773 chosen over 7770 — frank-primary owns 7770 when it ever returns.

2026-09-28

• Dankclaw model cleanup (disk was at 93%, 137 G free). Frank asked to clean up old models. 510 G staged to ~/.AGENTTRASH/20260928-retired-models/ — moved, NOT deleted, with a MANIFEST.md giving a restore command per item. Nothing is freed until the purge is approved; that is the point of the trash policy, and the number to know before expecting the disk to move.
  • Staged: CIRU Orca 128 G, halogen 123 G, unsloth Flash-Next IQ4_XS 91 G, mradermacher IQ4_XS 91 G, unsloth 27B 29.3 G, Kairic Edge 27 G, ISTA-DASLab GSQ-RCO 13 G, vLLM Gemma4 w4a16 9.6 G, vLLM Gemma4 drafter 838 M. Every one maps to a runtime already retired in the runbook index.
  • The 29.3 G rollback target went with them, by Frank's decision. The payload-only rollback is now a re-fetch first; both the runbook and AGENTS.md say so. The DFlash2 drafter was NOT reclaimed — only the .gguf was taken out of that directory, because the live frank-large drafter lives in it. The manifest warns against restoring the directory wholesale.
  • Kept deliberately: checkpoints/ 23 G. It is unreferenced by the repo, but ComfyUI is live and its workflows were not searched — not confirmed dead, so not taken. logs/x4e-run.log also stays: it is a sparse file, 3.3 G apparent but 4 K real, so removing it frees nothing.
  • A live reference check came first, and it earned its keep. serve-frank-small.sh's fallback MODEL_DIR still pointed at the retired GSQ-RCO payload frank-small served on 2026-09-16/17. The env file has always overridden it, so the drift was invisible — but a missing or unreadable env file would have turned a config problem into a "missing asset" naming a model that no longer exists. Repointed at Gemma4-12B-QAT/, which is what the env file already sets. Every other hit was a comment, a retired fetch script's destination, or retire_halogen_large_quadlet (which moves a quadlet, not a model).
  • Not taken, by Frank's decision — scope was models only: podman images (279 G reclaimable, 95%; 170 images, 23 active) and the uv+pip caches (73 G). Together that is 352 G of regenerable garbage larger than the models reclaimed, and it is the obvious next move.
  • Pre-existing: 118 G of trash from 2026-09-21 was already staged (20260921-frank-large-assembled 88 G, -redownload 30 G) and never purged. Total now staged on this host: 627 G.
  • Verified after the moves: frank-large and frank-small both active, both /health 200, and all three live assets (Swift target, DFlash2 drafter, Gemma4 target) still present.
• frank-large payload swapped to Swift-1.5 (uncensored) (production change, Dankclaw). Frank asked whether the UD Q8 of ajgazin/Swift-1.5-Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-Dynamic-MTP-GGUF would load on gufo, then said to do it. Port 7770, alias frank-large, one 262,144 session, the DFlash2 drafter and the client contract are unchanged; the 27B dense weights are an abliterated (uncensored) fine-tune of the same base, under the non-OSI SWIFT OPEN LICENSE 1.0.
  • Compatibility was established from the GGUF headers, not from the filename. Both files were range-fetched and parsed: same general.architecture (qwen35), same 866 tensors with identical names in identical order, zero per-tensor ggml_type or dim mismatches (Q8_0×453, F32×360, BF16×53), same MTP head at blk.64, same geometry. The two scary metadata differences are both no-ops, confirmed against gufo's source: general.file_type (15 vs 7) is "deliberately not consulted" by gguf_reader.cpp — the file gufo already served records 15 (Q4_K_M) while containing no Q4_K tensor — and Swift's extra qwen35.attention.recurrent_layers key is never read by gufo anywhere in src/; layer kinds come from full_attention_interval, which both files carry as 4 and which agrees with it.
  • Fetched and verified: 31,457,990,272 bytes, sha256 9076f99a… matching the Hub LFS oid, via the new /scripts/download-frank-large-swift.sh. It sends no auth header — the repo is public and ungated, and a token on the curl command line is world-readable via /proc/<pid>/cmdline. The anonymous transfer ran at ~1.8 MiB/s; resuming with the host's token through a mode-600 curl -K config took it to ~7 MiB/s. The download survived an ssh drop by running setsid nohup, not under the session.
  • Load test, service stopped first (the GPU policy): 9.2 s from load_started to load_completed, 66.5 GiB of the 116.7 GiB iGPU at context capacity 262,144, no loader warnings. Contract battery green: context_length 262144, content + reasoning_content, finish_reason: tool_calls, SSE, and a two-turn tool loop with prior reasoning preserved. Spot-checks: "17*23" → 391; asked for a lockpicking scene it wrote one without hedging, confirming the abliteration.
  • THE TEMPLATE LAW IS GONE, by decision. Frank asked to "use our chat template"; gufo cannot take it. This is not a missing flag — src/models/qwen/chat_template.cpp is 587 lines of hand-written C++ that appends strings, with no Jinja engine, no --chat-template-file, no env override and no template body in the binary. Qwen-Sharp v22.4.0 is 453 lines of Jinja2 with namespace(), macros and raise_exception, so supplying it is a port, not a config line. Frank chose to ship on gufo's stock renderer and accept the loss: the terse system-prompt injection, in-band <|think_*|> control, the json|xml tool_call_format switch, tool-argument truncation and add_vision_id prefixes are all gone. gufo's renderer does keep the effort instruction strings and preserve_thinking. Worth watching: an abliterated model now runs without the prompt that tells it to stop waffling — the cheap fix is to send the terse text as an ordinary system message from models.yml, not to touch a template.
  • The payload is now two files in two directories. The target moved repo; the DFlash2 drafter did not move, so DRAFTER_DIR is its own tunable. That broke the deployer's stray-run sweep, which keyed on the target filename and would have silently stopped matching — a stray run would then have held 7770 past the port gate. It now keys on the drafter, which every frank-large command line carries via --dflash-model and which did not move.
  • /tests/frank_large_unit.bats — 20 assertions. The mutation pass found four real gaps on the first run, all now fixed: two fetch assertions were satisfied by a header comment rather than the URL assignment, so repointing a repo left them green; and nothing bound the env's MODEL_FILE/DRAFTER_FILE to the filenames the fetch scripts actually download, so a re-upload or an env edit would break the endpoint with a "missing asset" no test predicted. There is now an explicit cross-file invariant. A second harness bug worth recording: a bats --filter that matches no test reports zero not ok, which looks exactly like a mutation that survived — the harness now asserts the 1..N count before believing a result. 16/16 mutations caught.
  • Docs: runbook gained a Payload section (the header evidence), The template law section and a two-way Rollback; AGENTS.md fleet table, frank-large section and rollback.
• frank-large runtime swapped to gufo (production change, Dankclaw). Frank asked for github.com/gufo-org/gufo — a vertical inference engine built for exactly this hardware (Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 / Radeon 8060S, gfx1151) — in place of the stock llama.cpp prebuilt. Port 7770, alias frank-large, one 262,144-token session and the client contract were all unchanged; only the engine was new, and the payload was the unsloth Qwen3.8-27B UD-Q8_K_XL at that point — it was swapped for the abliterated Swift-1.5 later the same day, see the entry above.
  • The runtime is built from source on the host. gufo ships no prebuilt Linux binary (the v0.1.0/v0.1.1 release assets are empty) and the host has no Nix. Pinned at v0.1.1 / b0f8673, installed to /home/dank/GitPackages/gufo-v0.1.1/ by the new /scripts/build-gufo.sh, which is reproducible and fails closed on a moved tag. Unlike the unsloth prebuilt it replaces, gufo links the host ROCm 7.2.4 through its RPATH, so the HIP dev packages must stay.
  • Two host workarounds, both encoded in the build script. Ubuntu's librocwmma-dev ships a truncated rocWMMA header set into /usr/include that shadows AMD's complete one; the build died on 'internal/accessors.hpp' file not found, and a -I cannot fix it because in HIP mode the host compilation pass searches the system directories first. The package has no reverse dependencies; it is removed. Second, Ubuntu 26.04 ships /usr/include/c++/16 and the ROCm clang prefers the newest tree, whose <atomic_wait.h> needs a std::__detail::__notify_impl symbol version the installed libstdc++.so.6 (GLIBCXX_3.4.35) does not export — the link failed until --gcc-install-dir was pinned to GCC 15.
  • gufo diagnose reports [PASS] on gfx1151 (ROCm 7.2.3, amdgpu loaded, 20 CUs). It self-caps compute queues at 2 resident for serve llm after reading /sys/class/kfd/kfd/proc/*/queues/*/type, which matters because ComfyUI holds queues on the same device.
  • Shape: one session, --context 262144, DFlash2 with the adaptive block policy capped at --draft-tokens 7 (llama.cpp's fixed depth 4 is gone), greedy, --think auto --preserve-thinking on, text-only.
  • Client-contract deltas, all in the runbook: the chat template is compiled into the binary (no --chat-template-file, so the Qwen-Sharp 73k-token-prompt failure mode cannot recur); reasoning_effort now accepts the full OpenAI set, so models.yml's reasoningEffortMap fold is no longer required — kept anyway so this commit does not also move every high role from xhigh to high effort; and there is no KV-quantization or prompt-cache-RAM flag.
  • Measured at cutover: 13 s from load_started to listening (target 8 s, drafter 2 s, session 3 s) against a 20-minute LLM_WAIT budget; RSS 30.6 GiB; a live short-prompt request returned Server-Timing: ttft;dur=549.8, inter_token;dur=24.2 (~41 tok/s). Verified live: /health 200, /ready 200, /v1/models → frank-large at context_length 262144, a chat completion carrying reasoning_content, a tool_calls response with finish_reason: tool_calls, and SSE streaming.
  • The trade, stated plainly. gufo's own Q8_K_XL tables against llama.cpp b11069: prefill +37 % to +80 %, cold load 4.5× faster, decode +7 % at zero depth — but −14 % at 65,536 tokens of depth and −24 % at 131,072. On the 8-bit target the crossover is ~32k and frank-large runs one 262,144-token conversation, so long agent sessions sit on the losing side of it. The Q4_K_XL target shows no such regression; revisiting the quantization is a separate decision.
  • /tests/frank_large_unit.bats — Rewritten around behaviour: the seam runs the serve script against a stub engine and asserts on the argv it actually execs, instead of grepping the script's text. A caveat found while writing it: bats 1.13 ignores a failing A && B in the middle of a test (bash exempts the non-final element of an AND-list from errexit), so every such assertion was split into standalone [ ] lines. Mutations confirmed the seam bites: dead runtime gate, DRAFT_TOKENS=0, a wrong context/sessions/port, an alias swap, a moved drafter, a removed missing-asset message and a neutered commit pin each fail it.
  • /scripts/deploy-remote.sh — deploy_llm_large gates on the runtime binary as well as the payload and returns before it stops the serving unit, so a host whose gufo was never built reports the failure instead of taking the endpoint down on the way there.
  • Docs: new /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-large-gufo-qwen38-27b.md; frank-large-unsloth-qwen38-27b-q8xl.md marked RETIRED (still the rollback target — the prebuilt and the payload are both intact on disk); AGENTS.md fleet table, frank-large section, bench policy and runbook index; both vault indexes; Dankclaw System Specs.md; README.md.
  • e2e gate: 32/33. The one failure is 192.168.0.112 (the FrankBook-Pro Mac mini) at 100 % packet loss — offline, and the same failure recorded in 564a781. Not related to this change; no frank-large test failed.
• Frontier-MoE feasibility study on Dankserver (research + build, no production change). Frank asked which of DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, MiMo-V2.6-Flash-MOPD and GLM-5.3-Flash would run best on the 2x R9700 box, and whether Affinity / vllm-radiance / FreeToken-AMD could be modified to run them fast. Findings, all evidenced:
  • V4.1 does not fit. 475.27 GiB checkpoint (measured from the HF API), of which 189.13 GiB is Engram in two 94.56 GiB shards. A token selects 240 routed experts at ~11 MB; at the 37-of-384-per-layer residency the hot stack can hold, ~2.4 GB crosses PCIe per token. At 55 GB/s real that is a ~23 tok/s ceiling — below the 35 tok/s goal before any attention or dense work. The 1000 t/s prefill target is ~20x away: the backend refuses layer-major prefill for V4.1, so the only legal prefill is token-by-token.
  • Affinity (Codeberg, StillDeadcode) is a DeepSeek-V4-Flash engine claiming 110 tok/s on two R9700s; it builds clean here (hipcc 23, gfx1201, zero errors). The 110 works because the 101 GiB container leaves the cold expert set in a pinned host pool in RAM. A V4.1 port reuses the quantiser, container, slab, host pool and placement engine (expert tensor naming is identical, 15,360 tensors at 40x384) but must write CED, CSA2's new indexer, the DSpark draft geometry and Engram — and Engram fails silently, because V4.1 has no num_hash_layers key so Affinity's model.h:36 default of 3 survives. Weeks of work, same capacity wall.
  • Lucebox is the only engine that runs V4.1 on gfx1201, on the unmerged feat/ds41-engine branch. Its own DS41.md measures 0.8-1.9 tok/s on an R9700 (best tuned three-tier case 9.1) with 61 GB of RAM; Dankserver's 246 GiB is the one untested lever, so the 377.5 GiB ROCMFP23 payload is downloading for a three-arm bench.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/Dankserver System Specs.md — RAM corrected 60 GiB -> 246 GiB (stale since the 2026-09-20 board swap; the Lucebox runbook had it right) and storage refreshed; /mnt/entropy is at 100% (244 G) and must not be planned for payload.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/dankserver-frontier-moe-feasibility.md — new runbook; indexed in LLM/index.md.
• LANDMINE, not changed here: /home/dank/models was cleared by Frank mid-session to free space. frank-primary is still answering :7770 from mmapped-but-unlinked inodes (/models is empty inside the running container) — the endpoint cannot be restarted until the 175 GiB payload is re-fetched. A reboot or a container restart takes frank-primary down.
• Deploy-state reconciliation (Frank's call: no restart) — the autoresearch trio (f187165 PLE 1800, 41e9189 prefix caching, ba2100e docs) was found already MERGED to main + pushed AND already live on frank-primary: the running frank-primary-r9v container (booted 12:13 from the ba2100e checkout) carries --enable-prefix-caching in argv and VLLM_PLE_OFFLOAD_READY_TIMEOUT=1800 in env, /health 200 — but deploy-state/frank-primary was still stamped f187165. A deploy.sh run would have re-selected frank-primary and reloaded the 175 GiB payload (~16–19 min) for zero behavioral change, on the endpoint this harness itself runs on. Stamped the marker f187165 → ba2100e (status deployed, atomic mktemp+mv per the deployer idiom); service untouched. e2e gate 32/33 — the lone failure 11-admin is the FrankBook-Pro Mac mini (192.168.0.112:8989) offline (100 % ICMP loss + TCP timeout), the documented asleep-host condition, not a regression.
• scripts/frank-primary.env, runbook — prefix caching DEPLOYED on frank-primary (Frank's go-ahead; commit 41e9189): E8-qualified, zero VRAM cost, 9x/63x reuse TTFT. Verified on :7770 (argv flag, health 200, completion "PREFIX-CACHE-LIVE"). Gotcha re-confirmed: the container is in dank's ROOTLESS podman store (sudo podman inspects an empty store and reports nothing); probe via the shim's docker or the unit MainPID.
• /scripts/frank-primary.env, /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-primary-r9v-radiance-qwen38-q8.md, /serverAppConfigs-docs/index.md — frank-primary prefill/decode bench matrix (scratch :7773, prod stopped 00:06 for the window per fleet bench law): baseline E0 (chunk 4096 / 80-slot sync / MTP4) = PP8K 954.6, PP131K 883.0 tok/s, decode 141.9 ms/step ≈ 23.8 t/s effective. Chunk 8192 (E1R): PP8K +25.9% (1201.4) but decode −8.5% and PP131K −4.4% — short-prompt win, decode tax, not the fleet's dominant shape. Chunk 16384 boots but OOMs at request time (0.93 GiB free) — 4096 is the ceiling (engine spec-config cap + memory). Expert cache 80 slots is the policy max (doctor: capacities 48/64/80, synchronous LRU only — async unsupported, 96/112 rejected); MTP depth 6 is 3.7x SLOWER than depth 4. Prefix caching (E8/E9): zero VRAM cost, cold path unchanged, reuse hits 32k 44.2→3.6–4.3 s (9x), 131k 439→6.9 s (63x); hit pattern rounds 1–2 miss / 3+ hit — RECOMMENDED, pending Frank's go-ahead. Two failure laws recorded: unqualified shapes fail mid-request (health stays 200), and PLE registration can blow the engine's 600 s VLLM_PLE_OFFLOAD_READY_TIMEOUT under page-cache churn (measured 740 s) — launch.sh gained R9V_PLE_READY_TIMEOUT forwarding (fork 2de0357, local-only) and prod now sets 1800.
• Incident — frank-primary down 00:06 → ~11:00 (11h): the bench window's required prod stop was never restored — the matrix + follow-ups ran 00:44 → 09:02 and the session let the endpoint sit dead (the 2026-09-18 "a bench session owes the fleet a health 200" lesson, re-offended). The first restore boot (09:46) then failed on the PLE 600 s timeout above (unit "Deactivated successfully", no journal error — the serve script exits 0 on the wait). Restored by the R9V_PLE_READY_TIMEOUT=1800 fix deploy (f187165, from main — the deploy gate refuses non-main): health 200 + MainPID = the serve script's own podman wait + live completion verified ~11:00. Deploy e2e gate 32/33 — the one failure (11-admin) needs the FrankBook-Pro Mac mini, which was asleep and ignored two WoL bursts (240 packets); recurring pattern per the wol-wake skill. Lesson: a multi-hour bench window needs an explicit restore task, not a "watch for DONE" — DONE ≠ prod up.

2026-09-27

• /scripts/frank-primary.env, /scripts/frank-primary.service, /scripts/serve-frank-primary.sh, /scripts/deploy-remote.sh, /tests/frank_primary_unit.bats, /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-primary-r9v-radiance-qwen38-q8.md (new), AGENTS.md + LLM index — frank-primary cut over to the Q8_0 payload (uncensored IQ4_XS → unsloth Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Q8_0, 175.30 GiB / 6 shards) at Frank's direction. Launcher gained the opt-in R9V_CHAT_TEMPLATE_FILE/R9V_CHAT_TEMPLATE_KWARGS passthrough (fork commit 30d4a32, local-only) — the Qwen-Sharp v22.4.0 template now serves, fleet parity with frank-large. Env points at /home/dank/r9v-state/q8xl/setup.json + the quantized-inject dev-overlay adapter (fork 363d606) + R9V_FULL_MUTABLE_CACHE=0; shard gates extended to SHARD4/5/6 (unset-safe); seams recalibrated; ctx window 131072 (models.yml maxTokens 36864). Spec decode is MTP4 only — the fork's speculative_config is a single dict, no chaining, so llama.cpp's draft-mtp,ngram-mod pattern is NOT expressible (PLE n-gram rides along architecturally). Uncensored state + payload remain on disk as the rollback target. 346 tests green.
• Dankserver frank-primary slot (experiment window) — the radiance-vllm-qwen4exp fork qualified the unsloth Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-GGUF Q8_0 payload (175.30 GiB, 6 split parts) on the dual R9700. Two launch blockers fixed loader-side in the fork: runtimes/dev-overrides/qwen4_exp.py dequantizes quantized block_inject shards in-stream (the Q8_0 payload quantizes BOTH fused-HC shards; IQ4_XS ships inject as F32 — the uniformity check rejected the mixed projection) and R9V_FULL_MUTABLE_CACHE=0 passthrough for the 80-slot tiered cache (fork commits 363d606, 2fe6dbb, 50a79ec — GitHub remote, not pushed). Battery on :7773: text + reasoning channel, vision ("Red" on a red PNG), prose ≈11.0 tok/s wall, MTP4 mean acceptance length 3.19–5.00; PLE pinned residency proven (mapping_bytes=54400261120, mapping_rss_bytes == mapping size, both ranks required 108.8 GiB vs 140.9 available). Relaunch recipe saved at dankserver:/home/dank/r9v-state/q8xl/START-COMMAND.txt; record at fork docs/qualification/qwen38-q8-0-dual-r9700-2026-09-27.md.
• Dankserver frank-primary restore — uncensored UD-IQ4_XS back on 0.0.0.0:7770 as frank-primary-r9v from its frozen config (health 200 in ~60 s; LAN-path completion returns content + reasoning); frank-primary.service (llama.cpp) runtime-masked for the window (/run/systemd/system/frank-primary.service → /dev/null — the /etc relink symlink blocks a plain mask; self-clears at reboot, unit file untouched) and the container runs restart=no, so a reboot returns the repo-configured llama.cpp with no contention. Restore config preserved at dankserver:/home/dank/r9v-state/uncensored/restore-config-20260927.env; scratch in dankserver:~/.AGENTTRASH/20260927-q8xl-bringup/.

2026-09-25

• /serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankserver/Jellyfin.md — Jellyfin LDAP 401 resolved: the auth works via the modern /Users/AuthenticateByName endpoint (HTTP 200, alex authenticated, full plugin flow logged: service bind → search → ldapUid → user bind → token). The 401 was a test artifact — I had been probing the legacy /Users/Auth/Password route, which Jellyfin 12.1 removed (the LegacyEmbyRouteRewriteMiddleware is gone). The web UI uses the modern endpoint, so user logins are fine. No config change needed; the LDAP-Auth 23.0.0.0 plugin + authentik 2026.8.3 outpost are healthy.
• /shared/homepage/services.json, /shared/homepage/docs.html — Suggested uses added to the three LLM model descriptions (status cards + the /docs model guide + the "which one to pick" foot-note): frank-large → cybersecurity + debugging (use requires Frank's permission); frank-medium → the primary intelligent model (surpasses Claude Sonnet 5 per Artificial Analysis) for software engineering, sysadmin, instruction tasks; frank-small → the fast/cheap utility model (agentic search, RAG, research subagents, translation, roleplay, summarization). Deployed to /srv/homepage; bats 19/19 + non-Mac-mini e2e green (d3c8197).
• /shared/homepage/{services.json,app.js,style.css,docs.html} — Model cards reworked to a structured three-line shape: each LLM card now carries a details object (role / spec / use) rendered as a bold pale-green role, a bright-green spec line, and a dim "Use:" line (app.js descHTML() falls back to the plain description for non-LLM cards; new .desc-role/.desc-spec/.desc-use CSS + bare-mode reset). Roles made neutral (no nicknames): frank-large = deep reasoning, frank-medium = primary model, frank-small = fast utility model. The /docs model guide was also fixed — it had drifted to retired model info (frank-large listed as Qwen3.8-Flash-Next 87.3 GiB / 200k, frank-medium as FP8 ~31 GiB) — now Qwen3.8-27B UD-Q8_K_XL 31.5 GiB / 262k and MXFP4/W4A8 19.4 GiB, reordered large→medium→small. bats 30/30 + live browser render verified.
• Fleet-wide container update (dankclaw + dankserver) — every pullable image brought current. Pinned bumps: authentik 2026.8.0→2026.8.3 (server/worker/outpost), tautulli v2.18.1-ls242→ls245, calibre-web 0.6.27-ls397→ls402, plex 1.43.3.10896→1.43.4.10903; seerr already at v3.4.1. Local-build rebuilds (forced --no-cache, the base images had moved): caddy (xcaddy porkbun), alloy, loki, comfyui-rocm (ComfyUI re-cloned), hermes ×3 (fresh :latest, 23986f31→e1e87aec). anubis already at latest stable v1.27.0 (only pre-releases exist beyond). Verified: all 16 floating-tag services CURRENT (zero stale), every real container active, caddy edge serving (auth 302 / ai 200), 340 bats green. Excluded: frank-medium/radiance-vllm (custom LLM build).
• /dankserver/{tautulli,calibre-web,plex}/quadlet/*.container, /dankclaw/authentik/quadlet/*.container — version pins bumped; docs (Tautulli.md, Calibre-Web.md, Plex.md, Authentik.md + server/worker, index.md) and the dead dankserver/compose.yaml plex entry synced (0b1ea2e).

2026-09-22

• /serverAppConfigs-docs/** — OKF v0.1 frontmatter migration: type/description/tags/timestamp added to the 65 non-reserved pages lacking them (timestamps from each file's last git commit); timestamp added to LLM/frank-medium-batch-ubatch.md and LLM/frank-small-benchmark.md; unquoted YAML scalars (colons, *arr) fixed in 13 pre-existing frontmatter blocks; frontmatter stripped from the reserved LLM/Pipeline Parallelism/index.md; log.md restructured to the OKF format (date-grouped, newest first, one line per change) from 40 narrative entries.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/** — Fact-check pass against scripts/AGENTS.md ground truth: 6 false "Active" banners fixed on retired runbooks, 96→114 GiB GTT in Shared Memory Architecture Dankclaw.md, deployment.md + Architecture/Deployment Flow.md rewritten to the Quadlet/deploy-plan.py truth, Calibre.md 9.9.0→9.15.0 + CVE-2025-7404 conflation (it is the Calibre-Web CVE), Copyparty.md v1.20.24, RomM.md 5.3.0 breaking change; *arr docs moved to a new FrankBook-Pro/ section (git mv, link-safe); active runbook bodies written for frank-large (unsloth UD-Q8_K_XL) and frank-small (Gemma4-12B).
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/Research/ — Three new research briefs (OKF): Local TTS and Voice Cloning.md, AI Job Search and Resume Tools.md, Most Popular Self-Hosted AI Apps.md (the 15 most popular self-hosted AI apps of Jun–Sep 2026, ranked by GitHub stars) + a self-contained dark-theme HTML report popular-self-hosted-ai-apps.html; upstream-version rows added to the ComfyUI/OpenWebUI/Hermes app docs (ComfyUI 0.37.0 native Qwen-Image 2.1, OpenWebUI 0.11.4 + /api/v1/images/generations, Hermes v0.21.4/CalVer v2026.9.21). All 336 tests pass; 136 pages, 0 unresolved wikilinks; docs-only deploy no-op.

2026-09-21

• /dankserver/frank-medium/quadlet/frank-medium.container — frank-medium cut back to the MXFP4 checkpoint (just1moremodel/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-MXFP4-awq); KV_DTYPE became a quadlet tunable, set auto (unquantized bf16 KV) to test whether fp8 KV had been degrading W4A8 output quality; pool auto-sized to 486,464 tokens; vision re-verified; e2e 32/32 (a45f396).
• /dankserver/calibre-server/quadlet/calibre-server.container — New boot-persistent Quadlet: Calibre Content Server on 192.168.0.235:8084 (OPDS + web UI), HTTP Basic auth, LAN-only; desktop image 9.15.0, --auth-mode=basic pinned, internal port 8090.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankserver/Calibre.md — Content-server section rewritten from "not running" to the deployed shape; Calibre-Web → authentik feasibility answered (guard chain, not in-app OIDC).
• /scripts/serve-frank-large.sh, /scripts/frank-large.env, /scripts/frank-large.service, /scripts/download-frank-large-unsloth.sh — frank-large (dankclaw :7770) moved CIRU Orca → unsloth llama.cpp b11030 prebuilt serving unsloth/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-GGUF:UD-IQ4_XS (87.3 GiB), 200k ctx, MTP depth 2 via explicit -md; the split parts ARE the payload — concatenating them trips invalid split file name (part 1's header advertises file_count=3); draft acceptance verified live 0.83–0.92.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-large-unsloth-qwen38-flash-next.md — New runbook; frank-large-ciru-orca.md marked RETIRED (rollback target); AGENTS.md + LLM index updated.
• /shared/prometheus/prometheus.yml — node-dankclaw target fixed to host.containers.internal:9100 (netavark DNATs published ports only; the node-exporter's host bind was unreachable by construction — a fourth down job the 09-16 audit had not listed); Infrastructure/Prometheus.md targets table + tests/observability_quadlet.bats contract updated.

2026-09-20

• /dankserver/frank-medium/quadlet/frank-medium.container — Checkpoint swapped MXFP4 → FP8 (orcarouter/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-FP8, MTP self-speculation depth 8, acceptance 5.66/8); the swap is now one command via scripts/hf-manifest.py + scripts/hf-fetch.sh + scripts/swap-frank-medium.sh; A/B on the FP8 target: DFlash2 100.0 t/s decode beats MTP 85.9 (accept length is a proxy, not the metric) — DFlash2 is the deployed shape.
• /dankserver/frank-medium/quadlet/frank-medium.container — Cutover to vllm-radiance TP=2 (95.8 t/s / 0.21 s TTFT / 259.4 burst-4 vs llama layer split 45.7 / 0.72 / 71.7; the winning arm is also 4-bit, part of the margin is quant); the llama root unit moved to scripts/.AGENTTRASH/20260920-llama-layersplit/ (never systemctl disable); KV pool auto-sized to 943,581 tokens (3.59× the window); tools, reasoning and vision verified live against the endpoint.
• /scripts/build-llama-rdna4.sh — Now takes GGML_HIP_RCCL; the RCCL build (build-rdna4-rocm714-rccl) made the tensor-mode bench arm fair (Ubuntu RCCL 2.27 carries gfx1201 device code; TheRock's does not — invalid device function).
• /shared/prometheus/rules/llm-fleet.yml, /shared/prometheus/prometheus.yml, /shared/grafana/provisioning/ — Monitoring spans the vllm: + llamacpp: namespaces (6 alerts + 3 recording rules); frank-small/frank-large targets fixed to host.containers.internal; the prefix-cache reuse rule divides by cached + prompt (llama.cpp's prompt_tokens_total EXCLUDES cached tokens); prefix caching measured at 1,648-token block granularity (13,021-token prompt 2.30 s → 0.68 s, 76 % reused).
• /scripts/dankserver-route-primary.sh — eno1 pinned primary (metric 100), eno2 retained failover (metric 200); applied with nmcli device reapply (no connection reapply in NM 1.54).
• Hardware — dankserver board swapped to the ASUS ProArt B850-Creator WiFi NEO: both R9700s on CPU root ports at Gen5 x8, every bridge AtomicOpsCap: Routing+, both endpoints ReqEn+ — the PCIe-atomics wall is gone; GPU BDFs moved, kernel 7.0.0-31, SMT back on (16 CPUs).
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-medium-radiance-mxfp4.md — Now the ACTIVE runbook (deployed flags, battery, capabilities, rollback); frank-medium-llamacpp-dflash2.md carries the SUPERSEDED banner; Dual-R9700-Cooperation.md states the measured verdict; Dankserver System Specs.md gained a Motherboard section; frank-medium-model-swap.md is the new swap runbook; AGENTS.md topology/sections/lessons flipped.

2026-09-19

• /scripts/frank-large.service, /scripts/serve-frank-large.sh — frank-large: halogen → CIRU v4.4.1 Orca (jcbtc Qwen3.8-Flash-CIRU-STRIX-Orca w4b, 262144 ctx, MTP depth 4, 4096 MiB PLE cache, text only); halogen is the rollback target (b6ce3af, f68bda5).
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-large-ciru-orca.md — New runbook.
• /scripts/frank-medium.env, /scripts/serve-frank-medium.sh — frank-medium: ajgazin UD-Q8_K_XL → orcarouter Q8_0 + z-lab DFlash2 Q4_K_M drafter; split re-balanced 35:30 → 32:33; pool 393216 → 327680 (d374ab9).
• /scripts/frank-small.env, /scripts/serve-frank-small.sh — frank-small: same-day vLLM detour reverted to mainline llama.cpp Gemma4-12B Q4_K_M + MTP sidecar + ngram-mod, q8_0 KV, 4 slots of 262144 (374041c).
• Hardware — 3090 EVGA FTW3 iCX3 RGB set MODE_OFF and saved to EEPROM (persists across reboots, headless).
• AGENTS.md, both indexes, halogen runbook retirement banner (764cf41, 88331e2); 331 bats + 32 e2e green.

2026-09-18

• /scripts/frank-medium.env — CACHE_RAM 8192 → 16384: the old cap was binding (137 journal refusals; a full 196608-token slot state ≈ 12.8 GiB cannot fit 8 GiB); the new cap clears one full slot and stays under half the host RAM; tests/frank_medium_unit.bats seam added; --ctx-checkpoints 0 confirmed a deliberate deviation (build default is 32) (1acca43).
• Incident — frank-medium found stopped twice: (morning) a bench round ended without the protocol's restore half; (midday) an orphaned llama-server from third_party/llamacpp/build-merge (PPID 1, loopback :17770) held ~16 GiB on each R9700 and would have starved the 35:30 allocation — proven abandoned (frozen CPU ticks, zero connections) then killed; health 200 in ~20 s. Lesson: "GPUs idle" is a check, not an assumption.

2026-09-17

• /scripts/frank-small.env, /scripts/serve-frank-small.sh — frank-small: ISTA-DASLab GSQ-RCO IQ3_S → HauhauCS/Gemma4-12B-QAT-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Balanced Q4_K_M + separate MTP assistant sidecar (--spec-type draft-mtp,ngram-mod); q8_0 KV (build-cuda rebuilt with -DGGML_CUDA_FA_ALL_QUANTS=ON, else ~12× prefill collapse); --fit chose the full 262144 window; audio transcribes verbatim; Gemma4 accepts every reasoning_effort level.
• /scripts/frank-small.env — CTX_SIZE=1048576 / PARALLEL=4 (four FULL 262144-token slots, the measured card ceiling: ~3,450 MiB/slot + ~8,546 fixed); ubatch 1024 deployed (pp ~965 / tg 226–302 at 253k; ubatch 2048 OOMs the MTP draft's pp buffer); draft n-max 4 + poll 100 measured WORSE at long ctx.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-small-gemma4-12b.md — New ACTIVE runbook; frank-small-qwen38-gsq-rco.md retired as rollback target.
• /shared/homepage/ — The three LLM cards moved to the user page with live descriptions; new static /docs user page (access chain, model guide, how-tos) routed in the post-auth listener (32751c0).
• /scripts/deploy-remote.sh — The pending pass now prunes stale pending state entries for retired services into ~/.AGENTTRASH and keeps going (a stale frank-default-sightsound entry made every --pending run exit 2) (02a7876).
• Fleet audit — Every vhost classified against the guard policy (no new exposure); systemd-hermes logged as a boot-persistence gap (running container, no quadlet); stray stopped test-vllm container on dankserver held for approval.

2026-09-16

• /scripts/bench-batch-ubatch.sh — New harness: one llama-bench invocation per cell (a test that cannot allocate exit(1)s, taking a whole sweep with it), per-cell VRAM sampler, service stopped/started from a trap; must run from a transient unit (LimitMEMLOCK=infinity is load-bearing) (87845fc, 77a07ff).
• /scripts/frank-medium.env — UBATCH_SIZE 1536 → 512 (prefill peaks at 512: 1193 vs 1078 t/s at 2048; 3.71 GiB cheaper) and TENSOR_SPLIT 36,29 → 35,30 (ubatch buffers cost ROCm1 ~2× what they cost ROCm0) (a11fae0); tests/frank_medium_unit.bats balance seam re-fitted as a shape assertion.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-medium-batch-ubatch.md — New page: the sweep, the logical-batch irrelevance, the amdgpu settle-after-kill trap.
• /dankclaw/frank-large/quadlet/frank-large.container — halogen restored as frank-large, retuned: ctx 262144 → 200192, pool 401408 → 400384, slots 3 → 2, max-tok 32768 → 24576, host-reserve 15 → 20 GiB, vision tower unset (moved to frank-small); ledger 95.4 GiB held / 14.7 GiB spare, no clamp.
• /scripts/frank-small.env, /scripts/frank-small.service, /scripts/serve-frank-small.sh — New frank-small: mainline llama.cpp 37b53fd on the RTX 3090 serving ISTA-DASLab GSQ-RCO IQ3_S with the in-file MTP head (draft-mtp), BF16 projector, 131072 ctx, f16 KV, port 7771.
• /scripts/deploy-remote.sh — deploy_llm_large flipped back to halogen with a wait_port_free 7770 gate (the first cutover died on Address already in use two seconds after the old server exited); deploy_llm_small added.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-small-qwen38-gsq-rco.md, /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/halogen-flash-server.md — New / re-activated runbooks; frank-large-ik-uncensored.md marked retired.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/x4-pair-experiment.md — New page: 3090 + Strix Halo over the x4 link. iGPU-only Vulkan matches halogen's ~25 tok/s with the 3090 idle but commits 116 of 121 GiB (throughput parity, memory bankruptcy); per-tensor cross-device placement is killed by -ot itself (has_tensor_overrides() → pipeline_parallel → n_copies == 1); the first "CUDA + Vulkan cannot serve one model" conclusion was a llama-bench parsing artifact (-dev A,B is a SWEEP, not a list — correct -dev A/B -ts x/y gives 27.55 / 27.23 tok/s, +7 % decode / +16 % prefill vs iGPU-only).
• Incident — The rootless podman pause process died (trigger NOT established; no OOM kill in the kernel log): every podman command failed, all 28 quadlets looped, podman system migrate panics in 5.7.0; a reboot repaired it. The reboot exposed hermes.franksdank.cloud 502: the Caddyfile dialed 192.168.0.143:8787 (a host bind, not a published port) — fixed to host.containers.internal:8787, and the seam that had accepted any numeric upstream was strengthened.
• Host — Model cache cleared on operator instruction (298 → 895 GB free) and re-fetched: halogen's sidecars came back LARGER (in-place versioning — a stale copy is invisible from the file name); Q4_K_S vs Q4_K_M measured +2–3 % with ~5 GiB more host RAM; IQ4_XS fetched as the next comparison payload; halogen-flash-server.md gained a "Refreshing the weights" note.

2026-09-15

• /scripts/frank-medium.env, /scripts/serve-frank-medium.sh, /scripts/frank-medium.service — frank-medium: the 3090 left Dankserver, two R9700s (gfx1201) in; runtime charlie12345/ROCmFPX c49ebdb with its self-contained ROCm 7.14 toolchain (bypassing the host's broken mixed ROCm); kingjones Q8_0 AGENT + Q4_0 MTP head; layer split chosen by measurement (1991/18.8 t/s vs tensor 271.8/26.3 — tensor's decode win costs a 7× prefill collapse with no RCCL); draft pinned to ROCm1; frank-small retired (retire_root_llm_small() archived the CUDA-era unit).
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-medium-rocmfpx.md — New runbook; freetoken-frank-small.md and kingjones-q8agent-rocmfpx.md marked retired/superseded; AGENTS.md, indexes, System Specs, deployment/Hermes/OpenWebUI/Plex/Stack pages updated.
• Host — Purged 167 stale AMD-repo ROCm 6.3.3 packages, removed the radeon apt pin and the ld.so.conf hijack (staged in ~/.AGENTTRASH/20260915-rocm633-cleanup/).
• /scripts/frank-large.service, /scripts/serve-frank-large.sh — frank-large cut to ik_llama.cpp (halogen quadlet retired to ~/.AGENTTRASH/20260915-ik-swap/); overnight decode campaign: 3.8–4.3 t/s across every safe configuration — the wall is ~100 CPU↔GPU section launches per token, not compute; mainline 37b53fd runs 1.0 t/s; the GGUF has no MTP head; 84 GiB of experts cannot fit 24 GiB VRAM (0c1e10a, 795b0b3).
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-large-ik-uncensored.md — New runbook with the full evidence chain.

2026-09-14

• /dankclaw/compose.yaml, /dankclaw/.env.example — New hermes-webui service (Hermex): bootstrap.py --foreground in the agent image, shares /home/dank/hermes-data, loopback-only publish 127.0.0.1:8787, password-gated via HERMES_WEBUI_PASSWORD.
• /scripts/deploy-plan.py, /scripts/deploy.sh, /scripts/deploy-remote.sh — hermes-webui registered as an isolated Dankclaw service in all three inventories.
• /tests/hermes_webui.bats — New seam (entrypoint, loopback publish + auth, shared volume, healthcheck, planner narrowing, deployer dispatch).
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankclaw/Hermes-WebUI.md — New page; remote access = Termius local forward over the existing router :22 port forward.

2026-09-12

• /dankclaw/marreta/quadlet/ — New Marreta content-cleaning proxy (Laravel) + Lightpanda browser quadlet pair, both joining gluetun's netns so browser fetch egress exits the ProtonVPN tunnel; NGINX_HTTP_PORT=8085 (SearXNG holds 8080), gluetun publishes 8082:8085; guard chain marreta.franksdank.cloud → Anubis → authentik (91e9410).
• /tests/marreta_quadlet.bats — New seam (17 contracts); deploy-plan.py: marreta joins the gluetun netns family.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankclaw/Marreta.md — New page (incl. the base64:-prefixed APP_KEY gotcha).
• Live — authentik ProxyProvider marreta (pk 13) + Application link: the outpost's config API filters application__isnull=False, so a provider with no linked Application is never loaded (the login-wall root cause); a null invalidation_flow crashed the Rust outpost's serde and took down EVERY provider on the outpost; regression spec 16-marreta.spec.ts.

2026-09-04

• /frankbook-pro/ — *arr fleet consolidated on FrankBook-Pro as the sole deployment (dankserver compose copy removed, /opt config roots trashed); all six containers share gluetun's netns — all egress exits the ProtonVPN tunnel by construction; the arr UI ports moved onto the gluetun unit; qB download clients repointed 10.88.0.1:8080 → 127.0.0.1:8080.
• /tests/frankbook_quadlet.bats — New seam: every arr+qB unit joins gluetun's netns and publishes no port; gluetun publishes the fleet's whole port set.
• /dankserver/ — *arr stack reactivated behind six own-auth TLS vhosts (the root-owned /opt/<svc>/config dirs that crashed every app at logger init are gone); documented the verified rootless identity model: container root (PUID=0) maps to host uid 1000 by default, and userns_mode must NEVER be added (podman-compose runs services in pods; --userns + --pod is rejected).
• /dankclaw/Caddyfile, /dankclaw/pihole/addn-hosts — Sonarr moved to the admin side: the unguarded public vhost + post-auth handler retired, Pi-hole A record dropped — no WAN path at all; homepage card repointed at 192.168.0.112:8989.
• /tests/e2e/ — Specs 11-admin/12-crawl de-hardcoded (expected open-link counts derive from the live services.json registry).

2026-09-03

• /serverAppConfigs-docs/ — Full fact-check sweep of every page against the live hosts (read-only SSH), quadlet units, and the Caddyfile; surgical edits only (docs-only change = deploy no-op): Dankserver core rewritten to live quadlet facts, the Caddy guard chain documented end-to-end, Gitea data roots + UID gotcha corrected, Prowlarr.md/prowlarr.md deduped into one canonical page, archive LLM pages reworded from current-tense to dated historical framing.

2026-09-01

• /frankbook-pro/gluetun/, /frankbook-pro/qbittorrent/ — WireGuard credentials provisioned (second Proton config, PA-12; one config = one keypair — two hosts on one config bounce the server-side endpoint and kill SearXNG); egress verified on the Proton exit; qB first-seed bug fixed (WebUI\Password_PBKDF2, not the legacy WebUI\Password key qB ≥ 4.2 ignores); DefaultSavePath → /Volumes/COMPLETE/Finished Torrents; download clients created in all four arrs; Sintel e2e through the tunnel at ~19 MB/s.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/Infrastructure/FrankBook-Pro.md — Rewritten to the active-tunnel reality (VM placement, WG gate, socat LaunchAgents, PBKDF2 seed); RDAP proved the "custom WG server" is a ProtonVPN Seattle server (full 65535-port scan: no admin surface anywhere).
• /dankclaw/authentik/quadlet/authentik-outpost-ldap.container — New LDAP outpost for Jellyfin (amd64 single-platform digest-pinned — podman 5.7.0 refuses the tag's nested manifest list); authentik objects provisioned via ak shell ORM; live bind tests proved two rules: the token intent must be verification, and the provider needs the search_full_directory object permission.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/Infrastructure/Authentik.md, /serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankclaw/Jellyfin.md — LDAP-outpost section (objects table + rules) and the LDAP-Auth 23.0.0.0 plugin section (LdapSearchAttributes is comma-separated; username attribute cn).
• /scripts/frank-small.env, /scripts/serve-frank-small.sh — Two compressed-tensors FP8 swaps attempted on FreeToken and both failed to load (ornith-1.5: expert naming; HauhauCS aggressive: block scales do not broadcast in _dequant_fp8_weight); reverted to Huihui FP8 within the hour; freetoken-frank-small.md quant matrix updated (modelopt block-fp8 is the only FP8 path that loads); the deploy health gate passed for BOTH failed loads — a swap is only proven by the journal + a real completion.
• /dankserver/{romm,jellyfin,calibre-web,copyparty}/quadlet/ — After a hard crash left every bare compose container dead at boot, the media stack standardized to quadlet: six units shipped + cutover handlers (retire bare containers, rescue RomM's anonymous volume, merge-move /opt/<svc> → /home/dank/Containers/<svc>); v1 generator quirks fixed (Command=→Exec=, Device=→AddDevice=, HealthCmd= space-splitting, the HOME=/root EnvironmentFile trap).
• /dankclaw/ — Data roots of gitea, authentik, and the hermes trios moved to /home/dank/Containers/<svc>/ while running (rename is inode-bound — zero downtime); deploy_hermes ordering fixed (generated units reload AFTER the unit files are copied).
• /dankclaw/seerr/quadlet/seerr.container — New Seerr v3.4.1 request manager: loopback-only 127.0.0.1:5055, guarded vhost + outpost provider seerr-proxy; /tests/seerr_quadlet.bats new seam; /serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankclaw/Seerr.md new page.
• /scripts/deploy-remote.sh — frankbook handler: the credential-gate SKIP state now propagates Mac-side before restart+verify; qB first-boot seed writes a PBKDF2 password + HostHeaderValidation=false + the four categories; full 7-service deploy run.
• /frankbook-pro/qbittorrent/quadlet/qbittorrent.container — qB pinned 4.6.7 (5.x's 204 login breaks Readarr's retired client; 5.x's conf rewrite leaves a PBKDF2 line 4.6.7 rejects).
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankserver/{RomM,Jellyfin,Calibre-Web,Copyparty}.md, /serverAppConfigs-docs/Architecture/Storage Policy.md, /serverAppConfigs-docs/Architecture/Deployment Flow.md — Updated to the quadlet reality, the Containers layout, and the two ownership regimes.

2026-08-30

• /scripts/frank-npu.env, /scripts/serve-frank-npu.sh, /scripts/frank-npu.service — New frank-npu on Dankclaw: FLM v1.0.1 serving the whole local registry (36 tags) on 52626; first deploy crash-looped (/dev/accel/accel0 err=-19) — root cause: the XDNA2 SVA bind fails whenever the AMD IOMMU is off; fixed with iommu=pt + reboot; vision + audio towers proven end-to-end; health probe is /v1/version (FLM has no /health route) (c3ed3a6, cf0c541).
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-npu.md — New runbook; AGENTS.md fleet table + the IOMMU/SVA hard requirement.
• /dankclaw/frank-large/quadlet/frank-large.container — frank-large: swapped to kingjones777/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-ROCmFP4-STRIX-GGUF on the pinned kingjones30/ROCmFPX fork (fa-on works UNPATCHED — the QSA F32 assert was agentionai-specific); ~225 s load, real 111k-token prefill at 213–232 t/s.
• /scripts/frank-small.env — frank-small (FreeToken): model swapped to batsclamp/Huihui-Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-abliterated-FP8 (native block-fp8); ~40 tok/s verified.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/kingjones-strix-rocmfp4.md — Reactivated as the large runbook; agentionai-fast-imatrix.md marked RETIRED; freetoken-frank-small.md model sections updated; LLM index + AGENTS fleet tables refreshed.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankserver/prowlarr.md, /serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankserver/qbittorrent.md — Rewritten: the arr↔Prowlarr feed contract (/{indexerId}/api, the global key — the hand-rolled /torznab/ paths were Forms-auth catch-alls returning 302), TV + music chains proven live, first real grab (The Dark Knight 2160p, imported), Prowlarr auto-sync broken by version skew, qB persistent credentials (WebUI\Password_PBKDF2, host-local 0600), Readarr parked (abandoned upstream; its client cannot authenticate against qB 5).

2026-08-29

• /dankclaw/Caddyfile — :8016 is now a uniform whole-request reverse_proxy authentik-server:9000 preserving Host; the per-vhost redirect/flow design and stale comments deleted (29f9a86).
• /dankclaw/anubis/policy.json — ALLOW ^/outpost\.goauthentik\.io/ so login/transport paths are reachable before the challenge dance (2a72efa); the policy bind-mount pins the file inode — a git checkout does NOT reach the running distroless container, so a --service anubis deploy restart is mandatory after policy edits.
• /tests/authentik.bats — Meta-header test replaced by the upheld contract (Host preserved; no absolute cross-host next= anywhere in the Caddyfile).
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/Infrastructure/Authentik.md, /serverAppConfigs-docs/Infrastructure/Anubis.md, /serverAppConfigs-docs/Architecture/Network Architecture.md — Rewritten to the live-verified mechanism: the 2026.8 embedded outpost routes solely on the original Host vs each provider's external_host (meta-header routing disproven live); proxy providers + applications provisioned for search/hermes/prometheus/romm/files; null authorization_flow/invalidation_flow starve the outpost's config fetch; the public zone gained the auth A record via the Porkbun API (ee1e038).

2026-08-26

• /dankclaw/Caddyfile — Both Plex vhosts proxy to PMS over a TLS upstream (insecure_skip_verify); PMS drops plain-HTTP connections from non-loopback sources (empty-body 502s).
• /dankclaw/gitea/quadlet/gitea-caddy.container — Standalone Gitea Caddy quadlet retired; web proxy ownership moved to canonical Caddy; deploy-plan/deploy.sh/deploy-remote.sh + tests updated for the migration.
• Incident — Post-reboot: Caddy (a bare compose container — restart: unless-stopped does not survive shutdown's explicit stop) and Pi-hole (quadlet crash-loop, restart counter 1645) were both down. Root cause: net.ipv4.ip_unprivileged_port_start reset to 80 by a later-sorted sysctl drop-in AND a stale line in /etc/sysctl.conf, which systemd-sysctl applies AFTER all of sysctl.d/.
• /AGENTS.md — New MANDATORY "Boot Persistence & Self-Healing" section.
• /dankclaw/caddy/quadlet/caddy.container, /dankclaw/caddy/env.example — Caddy is now a boot-persistent quadlet (joins dankclaw_default, Pull=never, env from /home/dank/Containers/caddy/env); removed from compose.yaml.
• /dankclaw/pihole/sysctl/99-dnsmasq.conf — Repo source of truth for ip_unprivileged_port_start=53; deploy_pihole stages conflicting drop-ins, comments out the stale sysctl.conf line, and applies sysctl --system (the boot code path).
• /tests/caddy_quadlet.bats (new) + caddyfile/deployment_flow/pihole seams — quadlet boot persistence, self-healing, network, env, and sysctl coverage.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/Infrastructure/Caddy.md, /serverAppConfigs-docs/Infrastructure/Pi-hole.md, /serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankclaw/Dankclaw Stack.md, /serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankclaw/Gitea.md, /serverAppConfigs-docs/Architecture/Deployment Flow.md — quadlet runtime facts, the 2026-08-26 incident, the sysctl-conflict failure mode, canonical Caddy ownership.

2026-10-01 — frank-primary RESTORED to fp8 3 x 262144 (bf16 boot fails)

bf16 (--kv-cache-dtype auto) at 2 x 262144 did not stay up, with OR without --expert-precise-memory:

• with precise: NRestarts 1->3, each attempt ~6.7 min then Deactivated successfully (API server drains after an EngineCore fatal error) — cause not captured, the serve script rm'd the container.
• without precise (default 7.60 GiB overhead, arena 14.3 GiB): NRestarts climbing, container Exited (1), and the journal finally showed the real error: RuntimeError: Worker failed with error 'Constraints violated (L['query_start_loc'].size()[0])! You marked L['query_start_loc'].size()[0] as dynamic but your code specialized it to be a constant (3)' — a torch.compile/dynamo dynamic-shape constraint violation, NOT an OOM. ~/.cache/vllm holds only modelinfos (16K) and each podman run gets a fresh container filesystem, so a stale compile cache is ruled out: the conflict is produced by this configuration's own compile path.

Differences from the last shape measured serving (fp8 3 x 262144, MNBT 2048, KV 6.1e9 -> 792,069 tokens / 3.02x / arena 6,248 / 3.59 GiB free): KV dtype (fp8 -> bf16) and SEQS (3 -> 2). Both are candidates for the dynamo trigger; --enforce-eager is the bypass that would sidestep the constraint path.

Restored: fp8 3 x 262144, MNBT 2048, KV_BYTES 6,100,000,000, no precise flag. Next: bisect bf16 vs SEQS in a window (bf16 + SEQS=3 isolates the dtype).

2026-10-01 — frank-primary: --expert-precise-memory + bf16 = boot crash loop

Reverted. The two changes Frank asked for were applied together and the result crash-looped: NRestarts climbed 1 -> 2 -> 3, each attempt running ~6.7 minutes then logging Deactivated successfully (vLLM's API server drains and exits 0 after an EngineCore fatal error, so podman wait returns 0; the new Restart=always turned a silent death into a visible loop).

The budget arithmetic explains it without needing the error text, because the arena is DEVICE-resident (the fp8 3-window shape's plan predicts 28.27 GiB and that is exactly what rocm-smi measured):

line	bf16 2 x 262144 + precise	fp8 3 x 262144
non-expert weights	6.28	6.28
pinned pool	6.80	5.68
CUDA graphs	0.55	0.55
arena	16.65 (precise: overhead 5.25)	14.31 (default: overhead 7.60)
non-torch	~1.45	~1.45
total	31.73 of 31.86 GiB	28.27 (measured)
free at boot	~0.13 GiB	3.59

--expert-precise-memory hands the 2.35 GiB compile/graph-capture headroom to the arena, and bf16 simultaneously adds 1.08 GiB of pinned pool; together they put graph capture ~0.13 GiB from the ceiling, where every transient allocation dies. So the flag is dropped and bf16 2 x 262144 ships with the default overhead: arena 14.31 GiB, ~2.4 GiB free at boot.

Lesson: the registry's "compile headroom" is not slack to be reclaimed by default — it is the budget for the phase that allocates last. Reclaim it only by paying for it elsewhere (smaller pool, fewer sessions, or a shorter context).

2026-10-01 — frank-primary: 2 bf16 windows + --expert-precise-memory

Frank's final shape for the night. Two changes at once, both measured in principle before the boot:

• KV is bf16 (--kv-cache-dtype auto), two full-size windows (2 × 262144). bf16 measures 13,839 B/token (from the bf16 3×241664 boot: 11,047,010,304 B -> 798,280 tokens), decomposing as 12,276 attention + 1,563 mamba/side caches against fp8's 6,138 + 1,563 = 7,701. So 524,288 tokens needs 7.256e9 B; pinned at 7,300,000,000 (~527,500 tokens, 3,206 margin). Cost: the pool goes 5.68 -> 6.76 GiB per rank.
• --expert-precise-memory. The registry's default overhead for this architecture is 7.60 GiB = the fitted 5.25 GiB (gfx1201 TP2 nbt4096/seqs16/len262144) + 2.35 GiB of compile/graph-capture headroom. The flag selects the fitted figure, which moves only the plan's room term — arena 6,248 -> ~7,278 slots (~1,025 more, at 2.344 MiB/slot) — at the cost of boot-time capture slack. The overhead formula adds 0.22 GiB per 1024 nbt above 4096, so MNBT 2048 pays nothing.

Budget note worth keeping: the arena is (budget - non_expert_weights - kv_reserve - graphs - overhead) // expert_bytes, where kv_reserve is the planner's OWN one-max-model-len reserve (2.48 GiB at TP2) and does NOT scale with SEQS. The pinned --kv-cache-memory-bytes therefore does not shrink the planned arena; it comes out of free VRAM instead.

2026-10-01 — frank-large: Q4_K_XL payload + 4 x 163840 sessions

Frank's call. Payload swapped from ajgazin's abliterated Swift-1.5 UD-Q8_K_XL (29.3 GiB) to unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF UD-Q4_K_XL (16.35 GiB, sha256 3f227079…b01e, vanilla/Apache-2.0 — the endpoint is no longer uncensored). New fetcher scripts/download-frank-large-q4.sh; the DFlash2 drafter and its fetcher are unchanged.

Shape: --sessions 4 --context 163840 with unquantized KV. gufo has no KV-quantization lever at all (execution_policy.hpp pins kv_cache_storage to kFp16), so "unquantized" is inherent.

KV arithmetic (why this fits where one 262144 session used to sit): f16 KV costs 64 KiB/token — 16 full-attention layers (the hybrid is full_attention_interval: 4 over 64 layers) x 4 KV heads x 256 head_dim x 2 (K,V) x 2 bytes; the other 48 layers are linear-attention with a per-SEQUENCE fp32 state (~144 MiB), not a per-token cache. 4 x 163840 = 655,360 tokens = 40.0 GiB of KV, and each session is exactly 10 GiB. Budget: weights 16.35 + KV 40.0 + drafter 1.07 + linear state 0.56 + runtime ~4 = ~62 GiB against the 114 GiB GTT.

2026-10-01 — e2e gate flakiness (12-crawl) — do not panic at the banner

specs/12-crawl.spec.ts:23 ("every user open link reaches its app") failed the deploy gate twice and then passed cleanly on a manual re-run:

• run 1 (deploy): Expected "plex.franksdank.cloud" / Received "app.plex.tv" — Plex redirects its web UI to the hosted app; the same failure appeared on the previous deploy too.
• run 2 (manual): page.goto: net::ERR_ABORTED at https://www.franksdank.cloud/ — the homepage answered http=200 in 40 ms from the dev box at the same moment, so this is a browser-level flake.
• run 3 (manual): 33 passed, exit 0.

So a red gate on this spec alone is NOT proof the fleet is broken, and the deployer's DEPLOY INCOMPLETE banner can be raised by a flake. Re-run tests/e2e/run.sh before treating it as real; the Plex redirect is the one stable underlying issue and it lives in Plex's web-client/image config, not in any repo service.

2026-10-01 — frank-primary bf16 no-spec cutover

• /scripts/frank-primary.env — bf16 no-spec cutover, FINAL shape after the night ladder: MAXLEN 241664 x SEQS 3, KV_BYTES 10,184,000,000/rank, KV_DTYPE auto (bf16), MNBT 1024, GATHER CHUNKS=32/LANES=64, UTIL 0.98; FRANK_PRIMARY_SPEC deleted (no spec). Engine measured at the winner: "KV cache size: 732,359 tokens, Maximum concurrency for 241,664 tokens per request: 3.03x".
• The night ladder (Frank's method). 262144 OOMed at CUDA graph capture (Tried to allocate 76.00 MiB ... 0 bytes free, 30.43 GiB of 31.86 GiB allocated by PyTorch) and 245760 OOMed identically; 237568 PASSED (KV 718,606 tokens) and the +4096 bonus step 241664 PASSED and is PRODUCTION. 241,664 is max possible on this box at util 0.98 — the model's native 262,144 does not fit with a 3-seq contract. Every rung was booted under a transient systemd unit at uid dank with LimitMEMLOCK=infinity (the rootless bench probe masked the production memory environment) with full engine-log capture.
• Util stays 0.98. The earlier 0.90 edit was wrong — lowering --gpu-memory-utilization shrinks the engine's own budget rather than buying slack; Frank forbade it and the winning ladder ran at 0.98.
• /scripts/serve-frank-primary.sh — --speculative-config line removed; --max-num-batched-tokens and the -e R4D_LRU_GATHER_CHUNKS/LANES container-env passthrough added; shape header rewritten.
• /tests/frank_primary_unit.bats — seam re-pinned: bf16-KV-present, spec-absent-by-measurement, gather-32x64-present, MNBT-1024 tests; the qualified-shape and flags tests flipped to the new env keys.
• Overnight redo campaign (prefetch OFF everywhere) tabled in /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/dankserver-qwen38-fp8-expert-offload-tuning.md with the 2026-10-01 cutover section: gather 32x64 +18.7%, MNBT flat 1024-4096, KV pool law (7,926 fp8 / 14,047 bf16 B/token), arena flat zone, six-slot refusal, bf16 3x262144 boot failure root cause (CUDA OOM at KV_BYTES 11.3e9; boots clean at 11.047e9 — captured from journald -o json).
• /AGENTS.md — fleet table frank-primary row rewritten to the bf16 shape.
• /serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/index.md — fleet intro + mermaid node updated out of the GLM era.
• Client contract fixed (thinking + tools). The live endpoint returned a null reasoning field and dumped the thinking text INLINE in content with a dangling </think> (measured: 'We need answer…Brief.\n</think>\n\n391') — the malformed thinking block clients choke on — because the deployed argv had no --reasoning-parser. The GLM rollback (d91379d) had dropped all three contract flags and the qwen rollback inherited the gap. Restored from ecaad36's values, confirmed against this fork's registries: --reasoning-parser qwen3, --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_xml, --default-chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking": true, "preserve_thinking": true}'. The seam's "NO tool dialect" test is flipped to a PRESENT test.
• Final shape (Frank's call): 5 seqs x the full native 262144 window at fp8 KV. 6 x 241664 at fp8 died (Tried to allocate 10.70 GiB, 9.18 GiB free) — six full-length contexts do not fit at any KV dtype — so the contract moved to five FULL windows: 5 x 262144 fp8 PASSED on the first rung, KV_BYTES 10,388,766,720/rank, measured 1,350,182 tokens / 5.15x concurrency (39,462 tokens of margin). Seam re-pinned; the bf16 three-context shape (241,664, KV 732,359 / 3.03x, measured earlier the same night) is the documented max at 3 contexts.
• Harness /home/blank/.omp/agent/models.yml — contextWindow back to 262144 with the five-window fp8 shape (compaction gap 183,501 + 36,864 = 220,365 <= 262,144) and preserve_thinking moved from a bare top-level body field to chat_template_kwargs (the form vLLM actually reads).
• Runtime-survivability correction: five slots -> FOUR. 5 x 262144 fp8 passed every boot gate (KV 1,350,182 tokens / 5.15x) but left 0 bytes free at runtime; a real client request (995-token prompt, max_tokens=261149, sampling params straight from models.yml) killed Worker_TP1 with torch.OutOfMemoryError: Tried to allocate 50.00 MiB ... 0 bytes free and the engine shut down. Boot is not proof of runtime survivability — after a knife-edge shape change, send a large-max_tokens request before calling it done. FOUR slots x 262144 fp8 (KV_BYTES 8,311,013,376/rank) returns ~1.93 GiB per rank for activations/graph capture. Frank's call 2026-10-01.
• /scripts/frank-primary.service — Restart=always, not on-failure (plus StartLimitIntervalSec=0 and OOMScoreAdjust=-500). A runtime worker fault makes vLLM's API server exit CLEAN, so ExecStart returned 0, systemd logged "Deactivated successfully", and on-failure NEVER fired: the endpoint stayed down until a human noticed. An explicit systemctl stop still wins, so bench windows and deploys are unaffected.
• Final shape (Frank's call, 2026-10-01): 3 x 262144, pool at the FLOOR, MNBT 2048, rest to the arena. MAXLEN 262144 x SEQS 3 = 786,432 tokens of contract; measured fp8 costs 7,698 B/token, so 6.054e9 B is the pool floor and the deployed 6,100,000,000 B leaves a ~5.9k-token margin while handing the remaining ~2.2 GiB (versus the 4-slot shape) to the expert arena — the decode-critical cache the fork sizes from the remainder. MNBT 2048 costs the arena nothing (the sweep measured 6,499 slots at every rung <= 4096).
• DCP investigated and closed (see the parallelism survey in the runbook): --decode-context-parallel-size 2 is rejected at boot — DCP for GQA requires TP > the model's KV heads (2), i.e. TP >= 4, i.e. four GPUs. Not a tuning knob on this box.
• Production bring-up: the shape boots and serves on :7770 — engine log verified (KV cache size, concurrency, MNBT 1024, gather 32x64) plus live contract probes (reasoning split, tool_calls). Rollback target for the 2026-09-29 fp8+MTP4 shape: git tag frank-primary-fp8-mtp-20261001.

2026-10-01 — frank-large cutover: gufo -> vLLM TheRock, MiMo-V2.6 BF16 + cross-model MTP

• Question that started it: can a Qwen3.5 MTP drafter attach to frank-small, and how does vLLM run the FULL BF16 MiMo checkpoint? Answer 1: not on frank-small — SGLang reads the MTP head from the TARGET checkpoint and MiMo ships ZERO mtp.* tensors (base and INT8 alike). Answer 2: the digest-pinned kyuz0/vllm-therock-gfx1151 image (vLLM 0.30 / torch 2.11 / TheRock ROCm 10) boots BF16 MiMo on the gfx1151 iGPU in ~200-240 s, and vLLM reads the draft from a SEPARATE path — so cross-model MTP from Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B (the distill's source, identical 4096/248320/32-layer geometry) works. Frank's call: ship that as frank-large.
• Bench window (frank-large stopped, one session, temp 0, 28,647-token prefill / 512 decode): base 17,876 t/s prefill / 13.1 t/s decode (13.1 is ~94% of the LPDDR5x BF16 roof - decode here is bandwidth, not a bug); +DFlash-8 7,976 / 17.4 (acceptance 59%/26% per position); +MTP-2 7,380 / 19.8 (71%/44%, token rate 57.4%). Deployed MTP-2: +51% decode. Both spec arms pay ~55-59% of prefill. num_speculative_tokens beyond 2 unmeasured.
• Measured numerics law: spec arms do NOT reproduce the no-spec greedy text (bf16 batched verification reorders reductions; near-tie argmaxes cascade). vLLM spec decode is distribution-preserving, not bitwise-greedy-preserving.
• Client-contract delta wired: vLLM emits reasoning, not reasoning_content - models.yml frank-large block now sets reasoningContentField: "reasoning", and the extraBody moved to the Qwen3.5-family recipe (0.7/0.8) with chat_template_kwargs (a top-level preserve_thinking is ignored by vLLM).
• Deployer gap found pre-deploy: the spec-draft gate demanded a single model.safetensors (the dflash layout) and would have rejected the deployed MTP arm (4 shards behind an index); fixed to accept both layouts, gated by bats. z-lab/Qwen3.5-9B-DFlash's "vLLM PR #40898 unmerged" card claim is FALSE - vllm/v1/spec_decode/dflash.py ships in 0.30 (verified in-image); the drafter stays on disk as the alternative.
• Host state: +38 GiB fetched (MiMo BF16 17.53 GiB, Qwen3.5-9B 18 GiB, DFlash 2.58 GiB), disk down to ~26 GiB free - reclaim pass due. gufo rollback pinned at git tag frank-large-gufo-q4kxl-20261001; engine, Q4_K_XL payload and DFlash2 drafter all remain on the host.
• First deploy attempt #2 crash-looped the container 51 times: the serve script handed vLLM the HOST model path while the tree is mounted at /models inside the container — transformers rejected it as a malformed repo id. Fixed by converting to the container path (the spec draft was already converted; the target was not), pinned by bats. Also fixed the deployer's own draft gate (same single-file bug as the serve script's).
• Reclaim (Frank approved): Swift-1.5 Q8_K_XL payload (30 G, refetchable via scripts/download-frank-large-swift.sh) and the orphaned flux-2-klein tree under models/checkpoints (23 G; ComfyUI mounts comfyui-data/models, not this) purged via ~/.AGENTTRASH/20261001-frank-large-reclaim/ — 52 G freed. KEPT the 1.1 G Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-Q4_K_M.gguf (it is the gufo rollback's drafter, not a remnant).

2026-10-02 — frank-large cutover: vLLM MiMo -> ROCmFPX Q8_0_ROCMFPX_AGENT + MTP

Frank's order was the highest quality of kingjones777/Qwen3.8-27B-ROCmFP4-STRIX-MTP-GGUF on one full context, "whatever runtime it requires". The answer is forced by the file: Q8_0_ROCMFPX_AGENT.gguf carries tensor type 103 (GGML_TYPE_Q8_0_ROCMFPX, ftype 115), which stock llama.cpp, gufo and every other loader on the fleet cannot read — only the kingjones30/ROCmFPX fork can, so the runtime is pinned to commit 36e9acd40e10a87cd3c3ef8ec734668757dc8520 and built by scripts/build-rocmfpx.sh. Shape: 1 session x 262,144 (native), f16 KV, the bundled BF16 mmproj, and MTP from the repo's own mtp-Qwen3.8-27B-Q4_0.gguf (n-max 4, --spec-draft-device ROCm0).

• MTP is the whole performance story: 17.0-17.1 t/s with, 7.60-7.66 without (+123 %), one session, temp 0, production stopped per arm, acceptance 0.462 / mean length ~1.86, at an 8-15 % prefill tax (325-351 vs 381 t/s). The AGENT routing variant was chosen over the card's plain Q8_0 because it keeps 187 output-head tensors at plain Q8_0 instead of 2, which measured MTP acceptance 0.953 vs 0.911.
• Steady GTT occupancy 63.1 GiB of the ~114 GiB aperture; boot to healthy 16 s.
• Rollback: git tag frank-large-gufo-q4kxl-20261001. The retired vLLM-era fetchers moved to old/. Runbook frank-large-rocmfpx-q8agent-mtp.

2026-10-02 — frank-small: Q5_K_M, then three contexts + vision, sized by two boots

Three orders in one day on the same endpoint: bartowski/…Q5_K_M on llama.cpp with two contexts ("whatever context size fits the 3090"), then three contexts "as much as can fit while keeping overhead open space to 2-3gb on the 3090", then "frank-small should have vision".

• Final shape: CTX_SIZE=540672 PARALLEL=3 = 3 x 180,224, f16 K + q8_0 V under flash attention, --mmproj vision, all layers on the 3090. Measured 21,684 MiB used / 2,441 MiB free of 24,576 — inside the 2-3 GiB band.
• The pool came from two boots, not a formula. 2 x 262,144 with no projector: 20,190 MiB used, KV 12,800 => non-KV 7,390 MiB. 3 x 196,608 with the projector: 22,972 used, KV 14,113 => non-KV 8,859 MiB. The difference prices the vision tower at ~1.4 GiB for a 918 MB file — the encoder's own buffers ride with it. The first 3-slot deploy (3 x 196,608) booted healthy but left only 1,153 MiB free, which is how the band got violated and why the seam now prices non-KV at the measured 9 GiB and REJECTS that shape.
• Three contexts cost window, and that is the tradeoff Frank was told: 180,224 tokens per conversation, not the native 262,144. A longer prompt is a hard 400 exceed_context_size_error, so models.yml sets contextWindow: 180224. Consequence at the time: frank-primary's then 183,501-token compaction request did not fit here with summary room — resolved later the same day when frank-primary's window moved to 200,704 and its trigger fell to 140,492 (see the shape-D entry below).
• Measured (2026-10-02, this shape): decode 106.8 t/s, prefill 3,814 t/s (~5 % faster decode than 2 x 262,144 — shorter slot, shorter attention scan), three concurrent requests answered in parallel in 1.7 s with a fourth queued at 3.0 s, native tool_calls, reasoning_content populated, reasoning_effort: low accepted, solid-red PNG answered "Red."
• Vision contract gotcha: /v1/chat/completions ignores the legacy top-level images field — that request answered "Brown." for the same red image, i.e. it generated from text alone. Only the image_url content part reaches the model. /completion accepts images but this build still requires messages.
• Deployer gates on the projector too (LLM_SMALL_MMPROJ), so a missing mmproj cannot silently ship a blind endpoint; MMPROJ_FILE= (explicitly empty) in the env file is the documented text-only opt-out and returns ~1.4 GiB to KV.
• Reclaim staged, not purged, awaiting approval: ~/.AGENTTRASH/20261002-retired-llm-payloads/ (~59 GiB of superseded payloads). Kept in place for rollback: MiMo-Q6K/, MiMo-Q5KM/, Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL/ and Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q8_K_XL/ (the latter holds the gufo DFlash2 drafter). Runbook frank-small-llama-mimo-q5km.

2026-10-02 — frank-primary shape D: 3 x 200704, fp8, pool sized for 2 contexts

Frank's order: shrink frank-primary to a 200704-token window with about two resident full-length contexts, cut the KV pool, and drop MNBT to 1024. The first attempt (30904ba, 2 x 200704 + SEQS=2) crash-looped; the revert went live as e460bbb, and the shape was then re-applied one law at a time on top of the proven-good base, root cause first.

• ROOT CAUSE: --max-num-seqs 2 cannot compile this model. It was never OOM, never MNBT, never the KV dtype. Four single-variable boot probes against the then-deployed shape (production stopped for each, candidate booted AS the service):

  MAXLEN	SEQS	MNBT	result
  262144	2	1024	Engine core initialization failed
  262144	2	2048	Engine core initialization failed
  262144	3	1024	healthy - 792,069 tokens, 3.02x, arena 6,248
  262144	3	2048	healthy - the then-deployed incumbent

  torch.fx.experimental.symbolic_shapes.ConstraintViolationError: Constraints violated (L['query_start_loc'].size()[0]) ... specialized it to be a constant (3), raised from AOT build_guards(strict_error=True) during determine_available_memory -> profile_run -> _dummy_run, ~7 min in. model_runner.py sizes that input buffer max_num_reqs + 1 and _dummy_run sets num_reqs = min(max_num_batched_tokens, max_num_reqs), so its width is SEQS + 1 for ANY MNBT >= SEQS - 3 at SEQS 2, 4 at SEQS 3, exactly the constant in the message. MNBT only moves the compile RANGE ((1,1024) vs (1,2048)), which is why the identical error appears at both rungs. --enforce-eager bypasses the path but drops CUDA graphs. The 2026-10-01 bf16 2 x 262144 failure was this same error class; its message named "KV dtype and SEQS" together and nobody bisected, so the dtype was blamed - it was a red herring.

• THE ARENA LEVER IS max_model_len, NOT --kv-cache-memory-bytes. The planner sizes expert cache as budget - non-expert - KV reserve - graphs - overhead, and the KV reserve is registry-priced at 9190 B/token x max_model_len, independent of the pool override:

  MAXLEN	KV reserve	arena
  262144	2.48 GiB	14.30 GiB / 6,248 slots
  200704	1.91 GiB	14.87 GiB / 6,496 slots

  d(reserve) 0.57 GiB = d(arena) 0.57 GiB = +248 slots. The 6.1e9 -> 3.15e9 pool cut (2.75 GiB/rank) bought zero arena slots. The previous session's premise - "the pool cut becomes arena, ~7,500 slots" - was wrong; the pool cut is a runtime-HEADROOM lever (the shape it replaced died with 0 bytes free on a real 995-token request).

• Final shape (option D): --max-model-len 200704 x 3 slots, fp8 KV, --kv-cache-memory-bytes 3,150,000,000/rank, MNBT 1024, gather 32x64, no speculative decode, prefetch off, no --expert-precise-memory. The argv keeps the only slot count that compiles; the POOL caps resident conversations. Deployed c769ff2, healthy in 558 s, e2e 33/33.

• Measured live, and one prediction corrected. expert cache space 14.87 GiB / 6,496 slots - the arena prediction landed exactly. But GPU KV cache size: 398,658 tokens, Maximum concurrency for 200,704 tokens per request: 1.99x (3,146,129,408 B reserved), not the 2.04x the arithmetic predicted: the per-token KV price is shape-dependent - 7,701 B/token at MAXLEN 262144 (6,100,000,000 B -> 792,069 tokens) vs 7,892 at 200704, ~2.5 % dearer. Never extrapolate a concurrency figure across geometries.

• Smoke-verified on the live endpoint: three concurrent 67-token requests answered in parallel (~4.1 s each) - the 3 slots are real; native tool_calls (get_weather {"city":"Seattle"}); thinking in reasoning with clean content; reasoning_effort accepts only {xhigh, medium, low} and answers 400 for anything else (re-measured; the fork's message names the set).

• Harness contract followed the window: models.yml contextWindow 262144 -> 200704 (compaction trigger 140,492 + 36,864 = 177,356 <= 200,704). Side effect: frank-primary's compaction request now fits inside a frank-small slot again, which it had stopped doing when frank-small went to 3 x 180,224.

• Comment-only follow-up 295d578 recorded the measured numbers and was deployed so the per-service revision marker sits at HEAD; e2e 33/33 again.

• Rollback for the pre-shape-D fp8+MTP4 era stays git tag frank-primary-fp8-mtp-20261001. Runbook dankserver-qwen38-fp8-expert-offload-tuning.