Frank
6bdfd2853e
18 pages cut their per-endpoint shape, payload, port and window claims and
link [[frank-archon]] / [[frank-dragoon]] / [[frank-zealot]] instead. Several
of the cut claims had already drifted -- the stack page still described the
kingjones ROCmFP4 era on ROCmFPX, OpenWebUI carried the 27B/3-slot bench
narrative, Hermes named a retired max_model_len and the old service name, and
the OMP harness page's live-window block had drifted off frank-zealot's real
262,144 (it is now labelled a dated worked example whose authority is the
endpoint page).
Two facts gain a single owner instead of two: the up{job=~"frank-.*"} scope
lives in Infrastructure/Prometheus.md, and the blackbox/Anubis probe form in
Architecture/Stale Signal Audit.md, each cited from the other page.
Voice Packs and Frank TTS carried live-state claims that contradicted the
engine page's 2026-10-18 deploy record (nothing listening on 7772/8880, model
dir absent); they now point at the pages that own host state.
157 lines
8.0 KiB
Markdown
157 lines
8.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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type: configuration
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title: Dankclaw Swap Configuration
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description: The host swapfile on Dankclaw — 64 GiB at /swap.img on ext4, fstab-driven via the generated swap.img.swap unit. Covers why it was raised from 8 GiB, the safe resize ordering that avoids an OOM on a host whose MemAvailable is inflated by pinned model weights, and the swappiness caveat.
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tags:
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- dankclaw
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- host
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- memory
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- swap
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timestamp: 2026-09-12
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---
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# Dankclaw Swap Configuration
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**Host:** Dankclaw (192.168.0.143) — **Filesystem:** ext4 on `/dev/nvme0n1p2`
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| Item | Value |
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| --- | --- |
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| Swapfile | `/swap.img` (68,719,476,736 B = 64 GiB, owner root 0600, mtime 2026-09-12 21:56 — `ls -la /swap.img`) |
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| Size | **64 GiB** (raised from 8 GiB on 2026-09-12); `/proc/swaps` reports 67,108,860 KiB |
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| Type / priority | `file`, priority **-1** — the only swap device on the host (`swapon --noheadings` 2026-10-18: `/swap.img file 64G 187.6M -1`) |
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| Filesystem | ext4 on `/dev/nvme0n1p2` (`df -T /` 2026-10-18) — swapfiles fully supported, no btrfs `nocow` handling needed |
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| Allocation | `fallocate` (preallocated, hole-free; **530 extents** — `sudo filefrag -v /swap.img` → "530 extents found", 2026-10-18) |
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| Persistence | `/etc/fstab` line 12: `/swap.img none swap sw 0 0` (`grep -n -i swap /etc/fstab` 2026-10-18) |
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| systemd unit | `swap.img.swap` — `LoadState=loaded`, `FragmentPath=/run/systemd/generator/swap.img.swap`, `UnitFileState=generated`, `is-active` → `active` (2026-10-18) |
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| `vm.swappiness` | `60` (distro default, unchanged — `sysctl vm.swappiness` 2026-10-18) |
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| zswap | disabled (`/sys/module/zswap/parameters/enabled` = `N`, 2026-10-18) |
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| Swap in use | 187 MiB of 63 GiB (`free -h` 2026-10-18) |
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| Free on `/` | **424 GiB of 1.9 TiB, 77 % used** (`df -T /` 2026-10-18). The 748 GiB that stood right after the 2026-09-12 resize is gone — ordinary fleet writes since then |
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The unit is **generated from fstab**, not a hand-written unit file. fstab is the
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only control point; `systemctl daemon-reload` re-reads it. Nothing in this
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repository references the swapfile — it is host-level state, documented here so
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it is not invisible.
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## Why 64 GiB
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Dankclaw is shared. The 2026-09-12 decision measured `frank-dragoon` alone holding
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**103.5 GiB of the 121.2 GiB** host, leaving roughly **7.1 GiB** for the then-28
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co-tenant containers whose working set was ~4.3 GiB. How that total is split
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between weights, KV pool and working memory is the engine's own ledger — it lives
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on [[frank-dragoon]]. That is a decision-time reading, not today's: on
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2026-10-18 the host reports **91 GiB used / 29 GiB available of 121 GiB**
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(`free -h`), 30 containers are up (`podman ps -q | wc -l`), and the
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`frank-dragoon-halogen` container accounts for **70.33 GiB**
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(`podman stats --no-stream`, same day).
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The engine itself warned at the time that when the headroom runs out,
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frank-dragoon and its neighbours "can stall for minutes at a time at full CPU with
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no disk activity and no output". Swap is the valve that turns an OOM kill into slow
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paging.
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Swap does **not** relieve the pinned-weights problem — see the caveat below.
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It protects the *co-tenants* and buys headroom for burst allocation.
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## The safe resize ordering
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You cannot grow an active swapfile; it must be swapped off first. On a host
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like this, **never `swapoff` before the replacement is online.** The old 8 GiB
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held 4 GiB of live pages, and `MemAvailable` read 73 GiB while only ~5 GiB was
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genuinely free — the pinned model weights are counted as reclaimable page
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cache, so the headline number is a lie by roughly the size of the model
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(see [[frank-dragoon]]). Swapping off into that apparent space, with
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nothing else to receive the pages, is how you invite the OOM killer.
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The ordering that avoids it — create and enable the new swap **first**, so the
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pages have somewhere to go:
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```bash
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# 1. Preallocate + format + enable the replacement, old swap still live
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sudo fallocate -l 64G /swap2.img
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sudo chmod 600 /swap2.img
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sudo mkswap /swap2.img # also rejects files with holes
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sudo swapon /swap2.img # total swap now 72 GiB
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# 2. Only now drain the old one — pages migrate into /swap2.img, not into RAM
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sudo swapoff /swap.img # took 65 s for 4 GiB
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# 3. Consolidate onto the conventional path so fstab needs no edit
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sudo swapoff /swap2.img # 725 MiB left, trivial
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sudo mkdir -p ~/.AGENTTRASH/20260912-swapfile-8g
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sudo mv /swap.img ~/.AGENTTRASH/20260912-swapfile-8g/swap.img
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sudo mv /swap2.img /swap.img
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sudo swapon /swap.img
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```
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Step 3 is chained tightly because it leaves the host with **zero swap** for a
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few seconds. Do not leave that window open.
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`mkswap` succeeding is itself a check: it refuses swapfiles containing holes,
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so a `fallocate` that produced a sparse file fails here rather than at 3 a.m.
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under memory pressure.
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## Verification
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```bash
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swapon --show=NAME,TYPE,SIZE,USED,PRIO # /swap.img file 64G 187.6M -1 (2026-10-18)
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systemctl is-active swap.img.swap # active; FragmentPath=/run/systemd/generator/swap.img.swap
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grep -n swap /etc/fstab # line 12 intact -> boot persistence
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free -h | tail -2 # Swap: 63Gi total, 187Mi used (2026-10-18)
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```
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Then confirm the inference service is unaffected — a completion, not just
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`/health`:
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```bash
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curl -s http://127.0.0.1:7770/v1/chat/completions \
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-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
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-d '{"model":"frank-dragoon","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Reply with exactly: SWAP64-OK"}],"max_tokens":48,"reasoning_effort":"low"}'
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```
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As run 2026-09-12: `finish_reason: stop`, `SWAP64-OK`, 28 containers up,
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frank-dragoon `health=200` throughout.
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## Caveats
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- **Swap cannot help the pinned weights.** frank-dragoon's weights are pinned
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deliberately; paging them is a stall, not a relief. More swap does not make a
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larger KV pool affordable — see the reserve/pool ceiling in
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[[frank-dragoon]].
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- **`vm.swappiness=60` is untested against this workload.** Under real
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pressure the kernel will happily page anonymous memory, and frank-dragoon's KV
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pool and working set *are* anonymous. Swapping the KV pool would be far worse
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than the OOM kill it prevents. If the box ever starts thrashing, lowering
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swappiness (or capping the engine's cgroup) is the knob, not more swap.
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- **`free` still lies after the change.** On 2026-09-12 `MemAvailable` read ~70 GiB
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while the model was loaded; on 2026-10-18 it reads **29 GiB** with 90 GiB sitting in
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`buff/cache` (`free -h`). The headline number moves with the payload; trust the
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engine's `host memory left for everything else` line, not `free`.
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- **Filesystem prerequisite (other hosts).** ext4 and xfs take swapfiles
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directly. btrfs needs `chattr +C` (NOCOW), no compression, and no
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snapshots in the swapfile path — check `df -T` before planning, or
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`mkswap` will reject the file.
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- **Renaming an *active* swapfile works (inode-based) but leaves a stale
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path in `/proc/swaps`** — swap it off first, then rename, then `swapon`
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(which is exactly what the step-3 consolidation does). Migration is
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observable while it runs: in the 2026-09-12 run `swapoff` of 4 GiB took
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65 s and used-RAM rose only ~3 GiB (pages touched during migration), the
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rest relocating on disk. If used-RAM climbs toward the whole swapped
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amount, let it finish rather than aborting.
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## Trash
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The previous 8 GiB `/swap.img` (dated 2026-07-21) was staged, not deleted, at
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`dankclaw:~/.AGENTTRASH/20260912-swapfile-8g/swap.img` (8.1 GiB). **That staging
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directory no longer exists** — `ls /home/dank/.AGENTTRASH` on 2026-10-18 lists only
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`20261005-frank-small-ubatch-ab`, `20261006-frank-large-tuning`,
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`20261007-openwebui-modelpicker`, `20261010-fleet-rename`, `20261017-bonsai-scratch`,
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`20261017-prism-build`, `20261017-v2abl-trial`, and there is no `/root/.AGENTTRASH`.
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The old swapfile has therefore been purged; nothing on the host still holds it.
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## See Also
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- [[frank-dragoon]] — the memory model that motivated this
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- [[Dankclaw System Specs]] — the Strix Halo box
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- [[Dankclaw Improvements]] — other host-level changes
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