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Frank aaef419a6d frank-large: replace stock llama.cpp with gufo (gufo-org/gufo) on Dankclaw

gufo is a vertical inference engine built for exactly this hardware
(Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 / Radeon 8060S, gfx1151), and Dankclaw's frank-large
has swapped runtimes seven times in search of a better one. This one
ships no prebuilt Linux binary, so the runtime is BUILT FROM SOURCE on
the host and the payload, port, alias and client contract stay exactly
where they are.

Runtime: gufo v0.1.1 (b0f8673) at /home/dank/GitPackages/gufo-v0.1.1,
built by the new scripts/build-gufo.sh. It links the host ROCm 7.2.4
through its RPATH — the opposite of the unsloth prebuilt it replaces,
which carried its own — so two host workarounds are encoded in that
script: Ubuntu's librocwmma-dev installs a truncated rocWMMA header set
that shadows AMD's and cannot be overridden with -I in HIP mode, and the
ROCm clang prefers Ubuntu 26.04's GCC 16 headers over the GCC 15 whose
libstdc++ is actually installed.

Shape is unchanged: one session, full 262144 ctx, the same UD-Q8_K_XL
target and the same DFlash2 drafter, greedy, text-only. Speculation
moves from llama.cpp's fixed depth 4 to gufo's adaptive block policy
capped at 7 proposals.

Client-contract deltas, all documented: the chat template is compiled
into the binary (no --chat-template-file, so the Qwen-Sharp 73k-token
failure mode is gone), reasoning_effort now takes 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-quant or prompt-cache-RAM flag.

The test seam now runs the serve script against a stub engine and
asserts on the argv it actually execs, instead of grepping the script's
text. The deploy handler gates on the runtime binary and returns before
it stops the serving unit.

Measured trade, from gufo's own Q8_K_XL tables against llama.cpp
b11069: prefill +37% to +80%, cold load 4.5x 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
conversation. The Q4_K_XL target shows no such regression.

2026-09-28 22:08:29 -07:00

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description

frank-large — stock llama.cpp Qwen3.8-27B UD-Q8_K_XL (DFlash2)

RETIRED 2026-09-28, replaced by frank-large-gufo-qwen38-27b (the gufo engine, same weights, same port and alias); the prebuilt is intact on disk as the rollback target. ACTIVE from 2026-09-21, when it replaced frank-large-kairic-edge-qwen38-27b (Kairic Edge IU4 W4A4) and frank-large-unsloth-qwen38-flash-next (the Flash-Next MoE it preceded).

Identity

Endpoint: frank-large at 192.168.0.143:7770 (Dankclaw).
Runtime: stock llama.cpp — the unsloth b11030 prebuilt (/home/dank/GitPackages/unsloth-llama-b11030/llama-server), ROCm gfx1151. A mainline build, not a fork: it supports the qwen3_5 architecture and the DFlash2 drafter (llama_model_qwen35, llama_model_dflash, common_speculative_impl_draft_dflash).
Service shape: root systemd unit scripts/frank-large.service (User=dank), launched by scripts/serve-frank-large.sh with tunables from scripts/frank-large.env.

Shape

Model: unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF:UD-Q8_K_XL — a 27B dense model, 31.46 GiB GGUF (sha256-verified by scripts/download-frank-large.sh).
Context: one stream, full 262,144 tokens (the model's native window), PARALLEL_SLOTS=1.
Placement: all layers on the iGPU (--n-gpu-layers 999). The 27B dense weights (31.46 GiB) + the DFlash2 drafter (1.14 GiB) + q8_0 KV (~8.6 GiB) + compute buffers fit the iGPU's GTT aperture (~114 GiB).

Spec method

DFlash2 (a block-diffusion drafter) at depth 4. The drafter is the z-lab Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-Q4_K_M (1.14 GiB), loaded via --model-draft with --spec-type draft-dflash and --spec-draft-device ROCm0. It has a sliding window of 2048, so its draft KV is small (~40 MiB). Greedy verification (--temp 0 --top-p 1.0 --top-k 0 --min-p 0.0) is required.

KV

q8_0 (--cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0), ~8.6 GiB at 262k. The unsloth b11030 build does not support fp8 KV (allowed: f32/f16/bf16/q8_0/ q4_0/q4_1/iq4_nl/q5_0/q5_1); q8_0 is the highest-precision 8-bit option.

Template

The Qwen-Sharp v22.4.0 template is pinned via --chat-template-file (dankserver/frank-medium/qwen-sharp-v22.4.0.jinja) with --jinja and --chat-template-kwargs '{"preserve_thinking":true}'. Without --chat-template-file the binary falls back to the built-in peg-native template, which produces a ~73,600-token prompt for a ~250-token request. preserve_thinking keeps prior thinking blocks across turns for multi-turn agents. The template gates reasoning_effort to {xhigh, medium, low} — the harness folds its levels onto that set in models.yml (reasoningEffortMap).

Payload

scripts/download-frank-large.sh fetches the main GGUF and the DFlash2 drafter, each verified against its declared byte count + sha256 (--verify-only re-checks). The serve script refuses to start if the binary, the main GGUF, or the drafter is missing.

Client contract

Alias: frank-large (the id at /v1/models).
Reasoning: extracted to reasoning_content (--reasoning auto, --reasoning-format deepseek, unlimited budget).
Tools: supported (--jinja is pinned).
Vision: none — text-only (no mmproj), matching the prior frank-large.
Sampling: greedy by default; a client that sends a temperature gets its own, and the harness applies per-model overrides from models.yml.

Failure modes worth knowing

Model load is slow (minutes cold). Health returns 503 while loading; do not kill the process. deploy.sh waits up to 20 minutes (LLM_WAIT).
--ngl (double-dash) is invalid in b11030 — use --n-gpu-layers (the serve script uses the long form).
The 8-bit UD-Q8_K_XL decodes ~17 t/s vs the prior 4-bit Kairic Edge IU4 at ~22 t/s — the ~23 % larger weight size (31.46 vs 26 GiB) explains the gap; it is not a regression.
DFlash2 draft acceptance is text-variety-dependent (0.85 on a trivial one-word answer, 0.519 on a varied explanatory prompt) — do not read a single-request acceptance as the steady state.

Rollback

Payload and runtime for frank-large-kairic-edge-qwen38-27b (Kairic Edge IU4 W4A4) remain intact on disk. See frank-large-unsloth-qwen38-flash-next for the Flash-Next predecessor it replaced on 2026-09-21.

Citations

unsloth prebuilts: https://huggingface.co/unsloth
Model: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF
DFlash2 drafter: https://huggingface.co/z-lab
Serve script: scripts/serve-frank-large.sh; tunables: scripts/frank-large.env

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