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Frank 301914b1c0 feat(llm): swap frank-large to halogen-flash-server, retire frank-npu

frank-large moves from the kingjones30/ROCmFPX llama.cpp build to
peonist-ai/halogen-flash-server 0.5.8 serving Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (w4b
.hgn 115.55 GiB + quality overlay). Upstream measures this engine at
roughly 4x the prefill throughput of the llama.cpp family on the same
gfx1151 silicon, and prefill dominates any prompt with real context.

Shape: a rootless Quadlet container (dankclaw/frank-large/quadlet/),
engine on container loopback :8730 (never published), OpenAI front-end
:8731 published as host 7770, HALOGEN_MODEL_ID=frank-large so no client
renamed anything. Context 262144, KV pool 262144 positions (~7.2 GiB,
conservative for a shared 121 GiB host), 4 slots, host reserve 24,
vision tower on, weights pinned, all other flags at vendor defaults.
Weights are fetched by HALOGEN_DOWNLOAD on first start into a writable
/home/dank/models/halogen.

The llama.cpp era (unit, env, serve script) is staged in .AGENTTRASH/
rather than deleted; the STRIX payload and the ROCmFPX build stay on
disk as the rollback target. deploy_llm_large becomes a user-quadlet
handler: it retires the old ROOT unit (moving its checkout symlink into
the home trash, never rm) and gates the first start on the download
rather than reporting a failure for a fetch that is working exactly as
designed.

frank-npu is retired in the same change. The kernel cmdline moves from
iommu=pt to amd_iommu=off for the 13-16% of prefill upstream measured,
and that takes the XDNA2 NPU with it: without PASID/SVA the driver
cannot open /dev/accel/accel0 (err=-19). Its five dependent routes are
repointed (Hermes vision -> frank-large, Hermes title generation ->
frank-small, harness vision -> frank-large, tiny -> frank-small, task ->
frank-large:medium) and its provider blocks are removed from both the
harness config and Hermes's live config. Audio input leaves the fleet
with no replacement; image input survives on halogen's vision tower.

Docs: new halogen-flash-server runbook, new IOMMU decision record, and
frank-npu rewritten as a retirement record. AGENTS.md topology, runtime
sections, benchmarking policy (frank-large is a user unit now) and the
harness model-config section are corrected.

2026-09-11 14:48:28 -07:00

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Server App Configs

Podman deployment configuration for two homelab servers: Dankserver and Dankclaw.

This repository is the single source of truth for both hosts. It tracks the container stacks and the LLM inference fleet. Edits flow through this repo, then deploy to the targets with scripts/deploy.sh (one script per target covers both workloads).

2026-08-22: the former vllmScripts repository (LLM fleet) is merged into this repo with its full git history. Its knowledge base now lives at serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/index.md.

Hosts

Host	IP	Role	OS
Dankserver	192.168.0.235	Media & library stack	Ubuntu 24.04
Dankclaw	192.168.0.143	AI, search & development stack	Ubuntu 26.04

Stacks

Dankserver Stack — RomM, Copyparty, Calibre, Calibre-Web, Caddy
Dankclaw Stack — SearXNG (via Gluetun), ComfyUI, OpenWebUI, Hermes, Gitea, Grafana, Prometheus, Caddy

Architecture

Network Architecture — Caddy reverse proxy, hostname routing, Gluetun VPN path
Storage Policy — bind mounts, data locations, ownership
Deployment Flow — service-scoped git deploy, target map, and health checks
Testing Policy — the test seams and how to run them
E2E Suite — the Playwright suite that drives the live guard chain
Container Network Namespaces — which local services are addressable from each Podman network namespace on Dankclaw

Dankserver Storage

Entropy Volume — command-line unlock and mount helper

Dankserver Services

RomM — retro game manager
RomM-Scraping — metadata providers, cover art, naming conventions
Copyparty — file sharing and streaming
Jellyfin — media server (movies, TV, music)
Calibre — e-book library engine
Calibre-Web — e-book web frontend
ARR-Stack — automated media download overview
sonarr — TV show management
radarr — movie management
lidarr — music management
readarr — ebook/audiobook management
prowlarr — indexer management
qbittorrent — torrent download client
Plex — media server on Dankserver (lscr.io/linuxserver/plex container via quadlet; CPU decode only — no GPU passthrough)
Tautulli — Plex statistics and notifications (v2.18.1-ls242, quadlet unit)
mariadb — RomM database backend
redis — RomM cache/queue backend

Dankclaw Services

SearXNG — privacy metasearch (VPN-routed)
SearXNG Providers — unblocking Google & other upstream engines behind the VPN
Gluetun — the VPN tunnel container
Valkey — SearXNG cache and limiter store
ComfyUI — node-based AI image generation (ROCm GPU, gfx1151 build)
OpenWebUI — chat UI for local LLMs
Hermes — the Nous Research agent
Hermes-Dashboard — the Hermes web management UI (config, keys, sessions)
Hermes-WebUI — the Hermex server (loopback API for the iPhone app, SSH-tunneled)
Gitea — Git hosting (migrated)
Postgres — Gitea database backend
Seerr — unified *arr request manager (guard-chained; fronts FrankBook-Pro's stack)

Infrastructure

LAN-DNS — name resolution, Pi-hole, router DNS hand-off
Pi-hole — the LAN DNS server (quadlet, records, web UI)
Caddy — reverse proxy and TLS
Anubis — bot challenge proxy fronting the guarded vhosts (chain, policy, gotchas)
Authentik — the homelab's SSO / OIDC provider (forward_auth)
authentik-postgres — Authentik database service
authentik-server — Authentik server + Caddy outpost service
authentik-worker — Authentik background worker service
Homepage — password-protected service index
Homepage Design Grilling — homepage decision log and open questions
Observability — Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Alloy
Grafana — dashboards
Prometheus — metrics collection
Node-Exporter — host metrics
Loki — log storage
Alloy — log shipping (replaces Promtail)
FrankBook-Pro — Mac mini *arr + qBittorrent inside podman machine (gluetun-gated)

Research

Service Research Brief — consolidated subagent research behind these pages
ComfyUI ROCm and Vulkan — live-verified GPU path for ComfyUI on Strix Halo
Lemonade and sd.cpp — the ggml-family image-generation alternative
Llama Cpp Runtimes — mainline vs charlie12345/ROCmFPX vs ik_llama.cpp: quantization + server fit
Llama Cpp Code Diff — code-level quantization diff of the three llama.cpp runtimes
SGLang — the structured-generation serving engine (llama.cpp/vLLM comparison + our fit)
Backblaze Integration — off-site backup plan (future)
Jellyfin — media server research brief
ARR-Stack — automated download stack research brief

LLM Fleet

The LLM inference fleet on the two hosts. Full index: serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/index.md.

Deployment and Topology

deployment — unified deploy and update process for both servers
frank-redo-2026-08-17 — the 2026-08-17 topology change
freetoken-frank-small — the active frank-small runbook: FreeToken v0.1.2 serving Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8 on Dankserver (2026-09-02)
freetoken-benchmark-sweep — KV pool vs decode speed sweep (bs1/bs3/bs4/bs6, 8k–700k KV) on Dankserver RTX 3090
kingjones-strix-mtp — the Qwen3.8-27B-Q6_0 ROCmFPX AGENT era with the standalone MTP draft (Dankclaw, 2026-08-25 → 2026-08-29; historical)
agentionai-fast-imatrix — the retired frank-large runbook: agentionai/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-ROCmFP4-FAST-imatrix (87.06 GiB, Q4_0_ROCMFP4_FAST) + own MTP draft, build-qwen38 (retired 2026-08-30; rollback record)
halogen-flash-server — the ACTIVE frank-large runbook since 2026-09-11: peonist-ai/halogen-flash-server 0.5.8 serving peonist-ai/halogen-qwen3.8-flash-next (w4b) as a rootless Quadlet container on Dankclaw, port 7770 — flags, memory model, client contract
dankclaw-iommu-translation-off — why Dankclaw boots with amd_iommu=off since 2026-09-11 (13-16 % prefill), what it cost (the NPU endpoint), and how to revert
kingjones-strix-rocmfp4 — the PRIOR frank-large runbook (2026-08-30 → 2026-09-11) and the rollback target: kingjones777/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-ROCmFP4-STRIX-GGUF on the card's pinned kingjones30/ROCmFPX build
kingjones-q8agent-rocmfpx — the retired Q8_0-AGENT investigation and set_rows failure
eemin-rocmi4-mtp — the former caf-eemin Qwen3.8-27B ROCmI4 embedded-MTP model on Dankclaw
ciru-activefpx-promptforge — the RETIRED v3 CIRU PromptForge runtime on Dankclaw (superseded 2026-08-24)
kingjones-strix-mtp — the kingjones Qwen3.8-27B ROCmFP4 STRIX MTP model on Dankclaw (active)
dealign-ornith-crack — the retired Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B CRACK model on Dankserver (retired 2026-09-02)
ikllama-ornith-dankserver — the retired ik_llama.cpp runtime for frank-small (q8_0 + Hadamard KV cache, split-mode none; 2026-08-26)
kairic-edge — the retired Kairic Edge IU4 experiment (2026-08-22)
dflash2-large-vulkan — the retired DFlash2 Vulkan deployment (2026-08-21)
Dankserver System Specs — the RTX 3090 box hardware
Dankclaw System Specs — the Strix Halo gfx1151 box (frank-large)
Dankclaw Improvements — host-level changes on the Strix Halo box
frank-npu — the RETIRED FLM NPU endpoint on Dankclaw (2026-09-11): Gemma4 E4B vision+audio pack on the XDNA2 NPU, port 7771; kept as the retirement record, including the IOMMU/SVA err=-19 root cause and where every dependent route moved

Benchmarks and Sizing

frank-large-benchmark — backend/spec benchmark behind the old head
ubatch-benchmark-large — active-model llama-bench ubatch sweep plan and results
frank-small-benchmark — the small-model benchmark suite
Running Qwen3.6 35B A3B FP8 on Dankserver — Qwen3.6-35B-A3B hardware notes
Running Qwen3.6 27B FP8 on Dankclaw — Qwen3.6-27B sizing on the iGPU
qwen3.8-strix-optimizations — Strix Halo tuning notes

Memory and Hardware

RAM CPU Offloading in VLLM — KV cache swap between GPU VRAM and system RAM
Hybrid CPU GPU Processing Dankserver — NVIDIA GPU compute with system RAM offload
Shared Memory Architecture Dankclaw — AMD unified memory and ROCm configuration
dankserver-vram-growth — VRAM/RAM growth behind the retired cuBLAS crash
Quantization by Hardware Architecture — which quant format fits which GPU/CPU

Retired Topology and History

Qwen3.8 PP Deployment — the retired pipeline-parallel head + worker
qwen3.8-spec-matrix — Qwen3.8-27B spec history (superseded by FastMTP)
FastFlowLM NPU Inference — the retired FastFlowLM NPU endpoint
DFlash DSpark Speculative Decoding — retired DFlash/DSpark drafting
ling-3.0-flash-trial — the Ling-3.0-Flash trial runbook
ling-3.0-flash-vllm-plan — the Ling-3.0-Flash vLLM plan (retired)

vLLM Reference (historical)

VLLM Overview — installation, CLI, API, architecture, quantization, parallelism
VLLM Index — quick reference with commands, endpoints, and parameter table
vllm_research_findings — research findings from the vLLM era

Pipeline Parallelism (archive)

Ethernet Bandwidth Math — the bandwidth budget for the PP pair
Expected Performance — expected PP throughput
llama.cpp RPC — the RPC transport between head and worker
Mixed-Vendor Experiments — cross-vendor PP experiments
Qwen3.6 27B Spec Methods — spec-decoding methods for the 27B
Sample Script Set — reference scripts for the PP pair
vLLM Pipeline Parallelism — vLLM's PP implementation

Update Log

log — chronological record of knowledge-base changes

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