The note described DSpark as the deployed drafter and 40:25 as the split; both were true for a few hours. It now leads with DFlash2 at 36:29 and keeps the excursion as the record it is: - the drafter comparison table with DSpark's REAL size (1,455,376,576, not the 1,359,284,737 that went into the fetch script), and why it lost: no sliding window, so its draft KV spanned the whole context. - the split's two moves as one story: the batch pushed it to 40:25, the drafter swap pulled it back to 36:29, with both measurement tables. - the layer-size law (0.43 GiB DeltaNet, 1.43 GiB attention) as the reason the balance is measured and not interpolated. - the verified-behaviour section now carries the LIVE numbers: 4.71 / 4.91 GiB free (4.43 / 4.61 under load, 0.18 GiB gap), the DFlash2 init lines, and draft acceptance from both slots (0.63 / 0.48 on slot 1, 0.39 on slot 0). - the fault note scopes its own evidence: 39:26 was loaded, not exercised.
26 KiB
type, title, description, tags, timestamp
| type | title | description | tags | timestamp | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| configuration | frank-medium llama.cpp Runbook (DFlash2 drafter) | The ACTIVE frank-medium deployment since 2026-09-16 — mainline llama.cpp on Dankserver serving ajgazin/Swift-Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-Dynamic-MTP at UD-Q8_K_XL with the z-lab Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2 Q8_0 drafter, as ONE layer-split process across both Radeon AI PRO R9700 cards at a 36:29 split, 262144 ctx over two slots. |
|
2026-09-16 |
frank-medium — llama.cpp (DFlash2 drafter)
The ACTIVE frank-medium deployment since 2026-09-16: mainline llama.cpp
serving ajgazin/Swift-Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-Dynamic-MTP-GGUF at UD-Q8_K_XL
with the z-lab DFlash2 block-diffusion drafter, as one process across both
Radeon AI PRO R9700 cards, layer-split. DSpark was tried in the drafter's
place for a few hours the same day and reverted — see The DSpark excursion.
It replaced the vllm-radiance MXFP4 replica pair + routing proxy
(frank-medium-radiance-mxfp4, the record and the PCIe-atomics evidence) in
the same day the pair went live. It is also the box's only LLM runtime: the
replicas, the proxy and their unit files are retired.
Why one process and layer split
The endpoint's whole history is one constraint: the two cards cannot take
part in an RCCL collective. RCCL's kernels declare a hidden hostcall buffer,
and ROCr refuses to supply it to a device without PCIe atomics; the second
R9700 hangs off the B650 chipset (AtomicOpsCap: Routing-, read-only), so
every collective that touches it dies with hipErrorIllegalState. That rules
out tensor parallelism — and it rules out vLLM's pipeline parallelism too,
whose stage handoff is a send/recv of the hidden state on the device
backend (vllm/distributed/parallel_state.py), the very primitive that fails.
The full matrix is in Dual-R9700-Cooperation.
llama.cpp's --split-mode layer needs no collective at all: layers are
distributed across the cards in order and the boundary activation is a plain
per-backend copy, once per forward pass. Measured on this host with the
predecessor runtime (llama-bench, pp4096 / tg128, f16 KV, flash-attn on):
| Split | pp4096 | tg128 |
|---|---|---|
one R9700 (-sm none) |
1160.9 | 19.42 |
two cards, layer (-sm layer) |
1991.2 | 18.76 |
two cards, tensor (-sm tensor, no RCCL: butterfly fallback) |
271.8 | 26.26 |
Tensor split buys ~40 % decode and loses 7× prefill. The workload here is prefill-heavy (agentic, long prompts, reasoning traces), so layer split is the shape — prefill nearly doubles and one model serves from both cards.
Hardware
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| GPUs | 2x AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 (DID 0x7551), gfx1201 (Navi 48, RDNA4) |
| VRAM | 34,208,743,424 B (31.86 GiB) each, as rocm-smi reports it |
| Link | PCIe, no XGMI; card #2 behind the chipset, no atomic routing |
| iGPU | Raphael (gfx1036) enumerates as HIP device 2 — hidden via HIP_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1 |
| CPU / RAM | Ryzen 7 7700X (8c/16t), 60 GiB RAM, 63 GiB swap |
Runtime
Mainline llama.cpp at fb27a525 (2026-09-16), built for gfx1201 only by
scripts/build-llama-rdna4.sh against a private ROCm 7.14.0a20260624
toolchain (TheRock nightly) that is bundled next to the binary —
RPATH=$ORIGIN/../lib, no LD_LIBRARY_PATH, nothing from the host's ROCm 7.1
packages.
Two features pin that ref, and neither is in the ROCmFPX fork the endpoint used
earlier the same day (its tip, c49ebdb, predates both):
- DFlash2 (
ggml-org/llama.cpp#27342): grouped dynamic depthwise convolution plus the candidate selector, detected from the draft GGUF (selector_top_k > 0) and served through the ordinary--spec-type draft-dflashpath. - qwen35 MTP: the
draft-mtpimplementation covers this architecture's single trained head.
Build with:
bash scripts/build-llama-rdna4.sh # ~25 min on this box, JOBS=$(nproc)
Bundling trap, measured. rocBLAS and hipBLASLt look for their device code at a fixed depth under the binary's lib dir (
../lib/rocblas/library,../lib/hipblaslt/library/<arch>).cp -r SRC DST/with a missingDSTcreatesDSTas a copy ofSRCand flattens it one level, and the failure is invisible at startup: the engine loads 29 GiB of weights, answers/health, and dies on the first request withrocBLAS error: Cannot read .../lib/rocblas/library/TensileLibrary.dat: No such file or directory for GPU arch : gfx1201. The build script now declares the destination and copies contents.
Model and drafter
| File | Bytes | Role |
|---|---|---|
Swift-Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-Dynamic-MTP-UD-Q8_K_XL.gguf |
31,457,990,112 | target, 29.29 GiB |
Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-Q8_0.gguf |
2,056,414,816 | DFlash2 drafter, 1.92 GiB |
Fetched by scripts/download-frank-medium-gguf.sh (resumable, byte-verified —
a truncated 31 GB GGUF is otherwise a load-time crash).
The target is Unsloth Dynamic 3.0 (per-tensor types from Unsloth's own quant of
the same size, on Unsloth's importance matrix) of an abliterated Swift
fine-tune: orcarouter's single refusal direction projected out of 131 tensors,
vision tower untouched. Text only here (--no-mmproj); the fleet's image
endpoint is frank-small.
The file also carries the model's MTP head (blk.64.nextn.*). Under
--spec-type draft-dflash those tensors are deliberately not loaded — the
log says model has unused tensor blk.64.nextn.eh_proj.weight ... ignoring —
because DFlash2 drafts from its own 5-layer sidecar. Switching (or chaining)
--spec-type draft-mtp,draft-dflash is a one-line env change that pulls the
head in; it is not enabled because the DFlash2 path is the measured one (below)
and because a chain cannot hold two context-backed drafters at all.
Deployment
| File | Role |
|---|---|
scripts/frank-medium.env |
every tunable, with the sizing arithmetic in comments |
scripts/serve-frank-medium.sh |
env-driven llama-server launcher; no arguments |
scripts/frank-medium.service |
ROOT systemd unit, User=dank, WantedBy=multi-user.target |
./scripts/deploy.sh dankserver --service frank-medium
The handler verifies the runtime and payload exist (and refuses otherwise),
retires the three vLLM quadlets into ~/.AGENTTRASH/20260916-vllm-radiance-retire/,
waits for port 7770 to be released (the retired proxy held it on the host
network), relinks and restarts the unit, and gates on
http://127.0.0.1:7770/health.
Deployed flags:
| Flag | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
--split-mode / --device / --tensor-split |
layer / ROCm0,ROCm1 / 36,29 |
both cards, one model, no collective; the split is skewed because ROCm1 carries the drafter, and it is one LAYER of granularity — 0.43 GiB on a DeltaNet boundary, 1.43 GiB on an attention one |
--gpu-layers / --fit |
999 / off |
everything on the cards; auto-fit must not resize a context we set |
--ctx-size / --parallel |
262144 / 2 |
the model's whole window over two slots of 131072; --parallel divides the context |
--batch-size / --ubatch-size |
6144 / 1536 |
3x the defaults; --ubatch-size is what the compute buffers cost, and it is what forced the rebalance |
--ctx-checkpoints / --cache-ram |
0 / 8192 |
no per-slot KV snapshots (the build's default); the RAM-side prompt cache is capped at 8 GiB |
--flash-attn / cache types |
on / f16 K and V |
an agentic checkpoint is the wrong place to spend KV precision |
--spec-type / --spec-draft-n-max |
draft-dflash,ngram-mod / 7 |
DFlash2 blocks are 8 tokens, so 7 drafts is the ceiling; ngram-mod rides the chain as a draftless second proposer |
--spec-draft-device |
ROCm1 |
the drafter rides the card that ends up holding the target's last layers |
--temp / --top-p / --top-k |
0.7 / 0.95 / 20 |
the values the vLLM predecessor served on this endpoint |
--reasoning-format / --reasoning-budget |
deepseek / -1 |
trace into reasoning_content, unlimited |
--no-mmproj |
— | text only |
The DSpark excursion (2026-09-16, tried and reverted)
The endpoint went live on z-lab DFlash2, was switched to magnitudedev/Qwen3.8-27B-DSpark for a few hours the same day, and was put back. Both are 5-layer block-diffusion sidecars, and their differences are what decided it:
| DFlash2 (deployed) | DSpark (tried, reverted) | |
|---|---|---|
| file | 2,056,414,816 B — 1.92 GiB | 1,455,376,576 B — 1.36 GiB |
| draft depth | block_size 8 -> n_max 7 |
block_size 7 -> n_max 6 (llama.cpp asserts n_max <= block_size - 1) |
| attention | sliding_window 2048, causal false, candidate selector (rank 256, top-k 16) |
no sliding window; a Markov head in place of the selector |
| draft KV at 262144 | ~40 MiB — the window bounds it | 5.0 GiB — the whole context |
A fetch-script bug this threw up. The DSpark file's size was recorded as 1,359,284,737 when it was fetched — 96 MB short of the Hub's 1,455,376,576 — and that wrong number became the fetch script's declared size, so
--verify-onlyfailed on a payload that was in fact byte-correct. Both drafters' sha256 have since been checked against the Hub's LFS oids and match.
The draft context is sized from the target's. cparams.n_ctx = llama_n_ctx(ctx_tgt) in common/speculative.cpp, with no flag to cap it
independently, so a drafter that declares no sliding window caches the entire
target window on whichever device --spec-draft-device names. DSpark's KV is
5 layers x 2 x 8 kv heads x 128 dim x 2 B = 20 KiB per position.
That cost has to be paid somewhere, and the failure was instructive: at a 1:1
split the model loaded fine, answered /health, and then died on the first
draft decode with ROCm error: out of memory inside
common_speculative_impl_draft_dflash::process — ROCm1 sat at 33.9 GB of
34.2 GB. A unit that crash-loops with an allocation failure after a
successful load is a sizing failure, not a broken drafter.
Read sliding_window out of a drafter's GGUF header before sizing a
spec-decode deployment — 40 lines of struct parsing is enough, and the
flag-level configuration looks identical either way.
The split moved twice: once for the batch, once for the drafter
Under DSpark. Tripling the batch (2048/512 -> 6144/1536) made the two cards
diverge: at 262144 the bigger --ubatch-size cost ROCm1 ~3.3 GiB against
ROCm0's ~1.7 GiB — ROCm1 holds the output layers and the drafter's graphs —
which left the draft-carrying card at 0.08 GiB free against ROCm0's 3.78 under
the 38:27 split that had been balanced at the smaller batch:
-ts |
GPU 0 free | GPU 1 free |
|---|---|---|
| 38,27 | 3.78 GiB | 0.08 GiB |
| 41,24 | 1.47 GiB | 2.38 GiB |
| 40,25 | 1.88 GiB | 1.88 GiB |
Then DSpark came off, which frees ~4.3 GiB on ROCm1 (5.0 GiB of draft KV out, 0.65 GiB of heavier DFlash2 weights in) and moves the balance the other way. Re-measured at the same batch, the same two slots and the same window:
-ts |
GPU 0 free | GPU 1 free | gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 39,26 | 2.42 GiB | 7.20 GiB | 4.78 |
| 38,27 | 3.85 GiB | 5.77 GiB | 1.92 |
| 37,28 | 4.28 GiB | 5.34 GiB | 1.06 |
| 36,29 — deployed | 4.71 GiB | 4.91 GiB | 0.20 |
| 35,30 | 5.14 GiB | 4.48 GiB | 0.66 |
| 34,31 | 6.57 GiB | 3.05 GiB | 3.52 |
One -ts step is one layer, and this stack's layers are not the same size.
qwen35 is 16 x (3 Gated DeltaNet + 1 Gated Attention), so a step is worth
~0.43 GiB on a DeltaNet boundary and ~1.43 GiB on a full-attention one
(0.45 GiB of weights plus ~1.0 GiB of its own f16 KV at 262144). Both fell out
of that table — 37,28 -> 38,27 moves a DeltaNet layer, 38,27 -> 39,26 an
attention layer. Balance by measurement, never by interpolating.
36:29 is both the minimum and the point that leaves the most room: it clears the
operator's 1.5 GiB-per-card floor by 3.2 GiB, so no headroom has to be bought
out of CTX_SIZE and the model's full 262144-token window stays.
A batch of 8192/2048 failed here under DSpark — its 2020 MiB pp buffer could not
be allocated on ROCm1, which had 0.08 GiB free. That was a contiguity failure,
not a total-bytes one, and it has not been re-measured with DFlash2's ~4.9
GiB of headroom. (tests/frank_medium_unit.bats fits the deployed point and
predicts it still would not fit, but that is an extrapolation of a coefficient
fitted at ubatch 1536.)
A fault to watch. A 39:26 split, at 1x batch and one slot, died on its eighth request: the amdgpu driver logged SDMA0 UTCL2 page faults and the engine surfaced
ROCm error: an illegal memory access was encountered->ggml_abort— a fault in the cross-card boundary copy, which is this layer split's hot path. It has not reproduced (36:29 has since served the whole verification battery and the e2e gate; 39:26 itself was only loaded at the deployed batch, not exercised), and it is not an OOM: no amount of headroom would prevent it.
Verified serving behaviour (2026-09-16)
-
Load:
model loaded~25 s after start with a warm page cache, thenlistening on http://0.0.0.0:7770. The drafter adds ~2.5 s. -
Slot shape:
n_slots = 2, n_ctx_slot = 131072;/propsreportsmodalities: {vision: false}and the sampler defaults above. -
DFlash2 engaged — the init lines are the proof, not the flags:
common_speculative_init_result: loading draft model '/home/dank/models/Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-GGUF/Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-Q8_0.gguf' common_speculative_impl_draft_dflash: adding speculative implementation 'draft-dflash' common_speculative_impl_draft_dflash: - n_max=7, n_min=0, p_min=0.00 common_speculative_impl_draft_dflash: - block_size=8, mask_token_id=248070, n_extract=5, sample_from_anchor=trueblock_size=8andn_extract=5are DFlash2's own metadata; the candidate selector is what distinguishes it from DFlash 1. DSpark logs under the samedraft_dflashsymbol withblock_size=7and a Markov head, so read the numbers, not the implementation name. -
Both cards hold the model and they are balanced: at 262144 with the deployed batch and split,
rocm-smireports 4.71 GiB free on GPU 0 and 4.91 GiB on GPU 1 of 31.86 GiB each — the same figures the balance search predicted to 0.01 GiB. Under load (two concurrent requests, one per slot) they sit at 4.43 / 4.61, a 0.18 GiB gap, and both are far above the operator's 1.5 GiB floor. -
Drafting is live on both slots, which is what a 2-slot deployment has to prove:
slot print_timingreporteddraft acceptance = 0.62857 (44 accepted / 70 generated), mean len = 5.40and0.48214 (27 / 56)on slot 1, and0.38776 (57 / 147), mean len = 3.71on slot 0, from one concurrent pair. Acceptance moves with the text; the point is that neither slot is idle. -
140,069 prompt tokens prefilled in 134 s (1043 tok/s) was measured through a single slot, at the previous configuration: the raised window is real rather than declared, and it is 22 % beyond the 114688 the vLLM predecessor could offer. The window is now split over two slots.
-
Nothing is replicated. The loader does not print a per-device ledger at this verbosity, so this is measured instead of read: raising CTX_SIZE from 131072 to 262144 added 4.83 GB to GPU 0 and 4.84 GB to GPU 1 — both cards carry the KV for their own attention layers, about half each — and neither card's total usage (24.94 / 29.42 GB at 262144) could hold the 31.46 GB file, so no card carries a full copy of the weights. Compare the shape this replaced: two vLLM replicas, i.e. two complete copies of the model, one per card, which is exactly why a 29.8 GB FP8 checkpoint could not be served there at any usable context.
Measured throughput (2026-09-16, deployed service, temperature 0)
Same filler corpus for every shape, so these are shapes rather than a
benchmark: a large prompt with a tiny budget isolates prefill, a small prompt
with a long budget isolates decode. draft/acc are per request; acceptance
moves with the text (filler prose accepts far worse than code or a real agent
loop).
| Shape | Prefill | Decode | Acceptance |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4k prompt / 32 out | 3994 tok in 3.25 s — 1230 tok/s | 59.8 tok/s | 71 % |
| 1k prompt / 512 out | 998 tok in 1.41 s — 707 tok/s | 43.8 tok/s | 41 % |
| 16k prompt / 16 out | 12,528 tok in 8.94 s — 1402 tok/s | — | 100 % (13/13) |
| 64k prompt / 16 out | 48,508 tok in 39.8 s — 1219 tok/s | — | 53 % |
| 140k prompt / 16 out | 140,069 tok in 134.3 s — 1043 tok/s | — | — |
| same 1k prompt again | 4 tokens prefilled | 43.8 tok/s | 41 % |
The last row is the prefix cache doing its job: the second request of the same conversation re-prefilled 4 of 998 tokens. Prefill holds ~1.0-1.4k tok/s from 4k to 140k, and decode sits at ~44 tok/s on a long generation — against the vLLM predecessor's 42.8 tok/s single-stream (two replicas) and the ROCmFPX llama.cpp measured here at 35.7-46.2 tok/s. One process, one model, both cards, no proxy.
What the drafter is worth — and why MTP is not the alternative
Measured 2026-09-16 with scripts/bench-spec-ab.py on the DFlash2 drafter —
the one deployed now: four configurations of the same binary, identical prompts
at temperature 0, unit stopped between runs (one host, one copy of a 29 GiB
model). 1k-token prompt, 512-token budget. These are the numbers that selected a
trained multi-token drafter over the model's own MTP head.
| Configuration | Decode | Drafting | VRAM (card 1) |
|---|---|---|---|
none — autoregressive |
17.7 tok/s | — | 26.07 GB |
draft-mtp n_max 3 (the model's own head) |
32.4 tok/s | 58 % of 72 | 29.35 GB |
draft-mtp n_max 7 |
26.7 tok/s | 33 % of 147 | 29.65 GB |
draft-dflash n_max 7 — deployed |
43.5 tok/s | 41 % of 119 | 29.42 GB |
- DFlash2 is worth 2.46× over autoregressive and 34 % over the best MTP. Deeper MTP drafting costs more than it returns: at depth 7 only a third of the proposals survive, at depth 3 more than half do.
- All four produced identical greedy text (
2, 3, 5, 7, 11): speculation buys speed, never a different answer. The harness warns loudly if a future configuration ever breaks that. - MTP is not the cheaper option. Selecting it loads
blk.64.nextn.*from the target and adds ~3.3 GB to the card that holds it, against 2.06 GB for the drafter's file — which is also why the load log saysunused tensor blk.64.nextn... ignoringunderdraft-dflash: correct behaviour, not a truncated download. - They cannot be chained.
--spec-type draft-mtp,draft-dflashdies at load withcontext type MTP requested but model doesn't contain MTP layers. A chain has ONE draft context, and MTP builds against whatever model that context holds — here the DFlash2 file. MTP's head is loaded only when MTP is the draft model (creating MTP draft context against the target model ...). That is structural, not a tuning question.
Chaining the draftless n-gram matcher (deployed)
ngram-mod can ride beside a context-backed drafter, and it is enabled.
The reason is in common/speculative.cpp: the n-gram types are added to the config vector
unconditionally while every model-backed drafter is gated on
ctx_dft != nullptr — so n-gram needs no draft context and cannot collide with
the drafter over one. (MTP is the opposite: it is context-backed, which is why
draft-mtp,draft-dflash cannot load.) The vector's fixed order — ngram types
first, then the drafters — also means CLI order is irrelevant.
The measurements below are DFlash2's — the deployed configuration. (During the
DSpark excursion the chain was draft-dspark,ngram-mod; the matcher's behaviour
is a property of the matcher, not of the drafter beside it.)
Measured with scripts/bench-spec-ab.py, decode tok/s, three shapes that a
proposer can and cannot match:
| Configuration | prose 1k/512 | echo 1.5k/400 (copy 0.94) | structured/400 | identity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
draft-dflash@7 |
43.77 | 76.82 | 91.08 | 70.37 |
ngram-mod alone |
17.72 (0 drafts) | 102.50 | 17.80 (0 drafts) | 17.77 |
draft-dflash,ngram-mod@7 |
43.65 | 200.58 | 91.22 | 70.40 |
- On prompt-echo traffic the chain is 2.6× the drafter alone (200.6 vs 76.8)
and twice
ngram-modby itself, at 100 % acceptance. - On prose it is indistinguishable from DFlash2 alone — the same 119 drafts and 49 accepts, the same 43.7 tok/s. That is the property that makes it safe as a default: where the matcher cannot match, it costs nothing.
ngram-modalone is a negative control: zero drafts on prose and identity (17.7 tok/s = the autoregressive baseline), 100 % acceptance on echo. Nothing else could have proposed those tokens, which is how its drafts are identified at all — see the trap below.- VRAM is unchanged (29.42 GB on card 1 with or without it): the matcher is a 64 MiB host-RAM hash table.
structured(25 records with unique ids) rewards no proposer: its lines differ, so there is no long span to match. It is a negative control for self-repetition, not evidence about it.
The window matters, and shorter is not better. The chain at three windows:
SPEC_NGRAM_N_MIN/N_MAX |
prose 1k/512 | echo 1.5k/400 |
|---|---|---|
| 48/64 — deployed | 43.9 | 200.6 |
| 16/32 | 36.0 | 161.0 |
| 8/16 | 36.2 | 113.8 |
A short window makes the matcher propose on ordinary prose fragments, where the proposals are rejected and the verification is still paid — the "ngram hurts" result this fleet measured twice before on other payloads. At 48/64 the chain keeps DFlash2's exact numbers on prose and wins on echo.
Operational trap:
ngram-modprints no startup banner in this build.journalctl -u frank-mediumshowsadding speculative implementation 'draft-dflash'and nothing for the matcher — the only evidence it is running is behavioural (draft_n> 0 where text repeats) or the per-task lineslot print_timing: ... draft acceptance = 1.00000 (256 accepted / 256 generated), mean len = 65.00. Do not conclude from the load log that the chain is not engaged.
The agent-loop shape (fleet harness, 2 families × 2 turns)
scripts/bench-turn-latency.py http://127.0.0.1:7770 2 2 LAYERSPLIT — two
agent loops re-sending a ~30k-token document concurrently:
| turn 1 | turn 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| family 1 | 24,799 ms | 30,697 ms |
| family 0 | 51,424 ms | 8,015 ms |
Read that against the prefill table, not as a latency regression: with one
slot the second family's first turn waited for the first (25 s of cold 30k
prefill + the wait ≈ 51 s), and the last number — 8.0 s — was a re-prefill the
cache could only partly serve. That was the 1-slot configuration. The
deployment now runs two slots of 131072, so a second agent loop has a slot
of its own instead of queueing, at the cost of halving the window each one
gets. --parallel splits the context and the KV between slots; it does not add
throughput, so the trade is concurrency against conversation length.
Observability
The endpoint exports Prometheus metrics under the llamacpp: namespace
(--metrics), which is what the fleet's scrape and dashboard read — the
vllm: series the predecessor exported no longer exist:
| Need | Series |
|---|---|
| Throughput | llamacpp:prompt_tokens_seconds, llamacpp:predicted_tokens_seconds |
| Queue | llamacpp:requests_processing, llamacpp:requests_deferred |
| Cache reuse | llamacpp:prompt_tokens_cached_total vs llamacpp:prompt_tokens_total |
| Speculative decoding is live | llamacpp:spec_decode_num_drafts_total and llamacpp:spec_decode_num_accepted_tokens_total (their ratio is the acceptance rate) |
spec_decode_num_drafts_total staying at 0 is the one-line answer to "is the
drafter actually running": the flags can all be right while the draft model
failed to load.
Client contract
OpenAI-compatible /v1 on 7770, alias frank-medium, streaming and
/health, /props, /metrics as llama.cpp provides them. Reasoning traces
are projected into reasoning_content. A request that sends no sampler fields
gets the server defaults above; a client that sends its own wins. Text only.
Troubleshooting
- Loads, then dies on the first request with a rocBLAS Tensile error — the
bundled device-library depth (see the bundling trap above); check
build-rdna4-rocm714/lib/rocblas/library/exists and is populated. hipErrorNoDevice/ a card missing —HIP_VISIBLE_DEVICESmust be0,1; the iGPU enumerates as device 2 and must stay hidden.- Drafting not engaged — read the journal for
common_speculative_impl_draft_dflash(DFlash2 and DSpark both log under that symbol); a missing drafter file makes the serve script exit before llama-server starts, and a drafter whose GGUF the build does not recognise fails the load instead. - Why is
blk.64.*"unused"? That is the model's own MTP head and it is correct fordraft-dflash. It is not a truncated download:bash scripts/download-frank-medium-gguf.sh --verify-onlyproves the bytes. - A rebuild segfaults at load — the build is gfx1201-only on purpose; a gfx1200 sibling binary links, loads the model and then segfaults on these cards.
See Also
- frank-medium-radiance-mxfp4 — the retired vllm-radiance MXFP4 deployment (replicas + proxy) and the PCIe-atomics evidence
- frank-medium-rocmfpx — the llama.cpp/ROCmFPX deployment earlier on
2026-09-15, whose
--split-mode layermeasurements this service reuses - Dual-R9700-Cooperation — why the two cards cannot take part in a collective, and every software escape that is closed
- frank-small-qwen38-gsq-rco — the fleet's other llama.cpp endpoint (RTX 3090, MTP, the image path)
- Dankserver System Specs — hardware inventory