serverAppConfigs/serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/frank-small-llama-mimo-q5km.md

---
type: reference
title: "frank-small on Dankclaw — llama.cpp, MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B Q5_K_M GGUF"
description: "The active frank-small runbook — a CUDA (sm_86) build of llama.cpp master serving bartowski's MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B Q5_K_M GGUF on the RTX 3090: two conversations of 200,704 tokens, fully unquantized f16 KV, mmproj vision, the boot-pair arithmetic that sizes the pool, and what to check when it misbehaves."
tags:
  - llm
  - frank-small
  - dankclaw
  - llama-cpp
  - rtx3090
  - mimo
  - gguf
  - kv-cache
timestamp: 2026-10-03
---

# frank-small — llama.cpp MiMo-V2.6 Q5_K_M (RTX 3090)

> **ACTIVE since 2026-10-02, resliced 2026-10-03.** One quant step down from
> [[frank-small-llama-mimo-q6k]] on the same runtime, resized twice on
> 2026-10-02 (three contexts with vision, then the pool that kept 2–3 GiB of
> the card free), and on 2026-10-03 Frank ordered the third shape: **two
> conversations of 200,704 tokens each with the KV VALUES unquantized** —
> *"2 streams with 200700 tokens context or more… if we have extra space on
> the 3090, unquantize the kv."* The freed third slot pays for exact V, and
> the boot lands **20,530 MiB used / 4,046 MiB free** — above the 2–3 GiB
> floor, with full-precision KV.

> **The tradeoffs of the reslice:** one fewer simultaneous conversation, a
> per-slot window that grew from 180,224 to 200,704 (still below the native
> 262,144), and ~2 % slower decode (104.8 vs 106.8 tok/s) from the larger
> per-token KV traffic. The 3 × 180,224 shape is one env edit away — see
> *Rollback*.

## Identity

|Field|Value|
|---|---|
|Endpoint|`192.168.0.143:7771`, served alias `frank-small`|
|Runtime|llama.cpp **master** (qwen35 model support), CUDA build `sm_86`, at `/home/dank/GitPackages/llama-master/build-cuda/bin/llama-server` — unchanged across the quant swap|
|Payload|`bartowski/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B-GGUF` **Q5_K_M**, 6,876,124,704 B (6.40 GiB), sha256 `04cf46f2b5584ef922697d6c063f94879434fb86c467f1a09e52daf0cddaf35f` + the repo's `mmproj-MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B-f16.gguf`, 918,166,048 B, sha256 `ff348f3180a63188aa7285db85f550fe38acb61dd013c599eb8bad08d2cc2576` — both at `/home/dank/models/MiMo-Q5KM/`, fetched and byte- and sha256-verified by `scripts/download-frank-small.sh`|
|Unit|root `frank-small.service` (repo `scripts/frank-small.service`, `User=dank`, relinked), env `scripts/frank-small.env`, serve `scripts/serve-frank-small.sh`|
|Repo pins|`tests/frank_small_unit.bats` (stub-argv seam + the VRAM arithmetic), `deploy_llm_small` gates in `scripts/deploy-remote.sh`|

## Shape and the KV contract

`--ctx-size 401408 --parallel 2` — llama.cpp divides the pool across slots,
so each conversation gets `n_ctx_slot = 200704` (boot log 2026-10-03:
`n_slots = 2, n_ctx_slot = 200704, kv_unified = 'false'`). `CTX_SIZE` MUST
stay divisible by `PARALLEL`; the bats seam enforces it.

The KV contract is Frank's, as of 2026-10-03: **both K and V unquantized
(f16)** — `--cache-type-k f16 --cache-type-v f16`. The asymmetric contract it
replaced (f16 K + `q8_0` V) had existed to make three slots fit; with two
slots the exact-value budget opens, and 4 KiB/token × 8 layers × 2 of extra
V traffic is the measured ~2 % decode tax. The serve script still passes both
flags explicitly — the asymmetric-era law that a quantized V requires
`--flash-attn on` stays pinned by the seam.

**Pool sizes on this stack come from boots, not formulas.** The compute
buffers, CUDA graphs and vision tower all bill separately, so every shape
change is priced from measured rows:

|Shape|KV dtype (K+V)|Projector|`nvidia-smi` used|Non-KV (weights + buffers + projector)|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|2 × 262,144 (pool 524,288)|f16 + q8_0|none|20,190 MiB|**7,390 MiB**|
|3 × 196,608 (pool 589,824)|f16 + q8_0|f16|22,972 MiB|**8,859 MiB**|
|3 × 180,224 (pool 540,672)|f16 + q8_0|f16|21,684 MiB|~8,419 MiB|
|**2 × 200,704 (pool 401,408)**|**f16 + f16**|f16|**20,530 MiB**|**~7,986 MiB**|

The 32 KiB/token full-attention KV price (8 layers × 4 KV heads × 256 dim ×
2 B × 2 halves) prices the deployed pool at 401,408 × 32 KiB = **12,544 MiB
of KV**; the card is 24,576 MiB, so the shape leaves **4,046 MiB free**
(measured steady-state — the KV pool is allocated whole at boot, so this is
the ceiling). The headroom above the 2–3 GiB floor is deliberate slack, not
an invitation: another 32,768 tokens of pool (1 GiB) would trade the last
safety margin for window the harness compacts before reaching anyway.

**Why 2 × 262,144 with f16 V does not fit either.** The native window pair is
524,288 tokens = 16,384 MiB of KV plus ~7,986 non-KV = 24.4 GiB: under the
floor by a hair. 200,704 is the largest 4,096-aligned slice that keeps the
measured band.

## Measured on this shape (2026-10-03, 2 × 200,704 + vision, f16 KV)

|Check|Result|
|---|---|
|Boot to healthy|~5 s, `n_slots = 2`, `n_ctx_slot = 200704`, `loaded multimodal model` logged|
|VRAM|**20,530 MiB used / 4,046 MiB free** of 24,576 (`nvidia-smi`, steady state)|
|Decode, temp 0, no thinking|**104.84 tok/s** (128-token completion at ~500-token depth; the 3 × 180,224 q8_0-V shape measured 106.8 — ~2 % is the honest price of exact V)|
|Prefill|1,650 t/s on the same shallow 506-token probe (rates are depth- and prompt-dependent; not comparable across shapes)|
|Batch geometry|`--batch-size 2048 --ubatch-size 1024` — ubatch 2048 failed the scratch boot; 1024 boots clean|
|Vision|projector loads at boot (`loaded multimodal model`); the red-PNG probe stands from the 2026-10-02 verification — the vision path is unchanged by this reslice|
|Tools / thinking|unchanged by the reslice: native `tool_calls`, thinking in `reasoning_content`|

## What the slot geometry costs

The per-slot window is the whole price, in both directions:

- **A prompt over 200,704 tokens is a hard 400**, so `~/.omp/agent/models.yml`
  sets `contextWindow: 200704` for this endpoint — the harness compacts before
  it reaches the ceiling instead of discovering it.
- **frank-large's tallest pre-compaction prompt now fits here.** Compaction
  for frank-large sessions runs on this endpoint (`compactionModel` in
  `models.yml`); frank-large compacts at 70 % of 262,144 = 183,501 tokens,
  which did **not** fit the old 180,224 slot and fits 200,704 with 17,163
  tokens to spare. The 2026-10-02 window trim had restored the fit for
  frank-primary's smaller 140,492-token trigger; the 2026-10-03 reslice widens
  the fit to frank-large itself. Nothing routes compaction automatically —
  the point is the ceiling no longer forbids it.
- Two simultaneous generations are the slot ceiling; a third request queues
  behind a released slot (the mechanism measured on the 3-slot shape).

## Client contract

- Thinking arrives in **`reasoning_content`** (`--reasoning-format deepseek`),
  the field `models.yml` reads for this endpoint.
- **Thinking is off unless the request asks**: the MiMo GGUF template defaults
  `enable_thinking` false, so `models.yml` ships
  `chat_template_kwargs: {enable_thinking: true, preserve_thinking: true}` in
  `extraBody`. A raw client that omits it gets a direct answer — measured, and
  not a fault. Trivial questions produce no thinking even with the flag on.
- Tools: `--jinja` + server-side parsing, verified 2026-10-02.
- **Vision is on**, through the projector file (`--mmproj`). Use the
  OpenAI-standard `image_url` content part — that path answers correctly
  ("Red." on a solid-red PNG). The legacy top-level `images` field is **not**
  read by `/v1/chat/completions`: the same request sent that way answered
  "Brown.", i.e. it generated from text alone. `/completion` takes `images`
  but refuses a request without `messages` in this build, so chat is the only
  vision path.
- Setting `MMPROJ_FILE=` (explicitly empty) in `scripts/frank-small.env` drops
  `--mmproj` and returns ~1.4 GiB of the card to KV — the documented text-only
  opt-out. `MMPROJ_FILE` pointing at a file that does not exist is a boot
  refusal, never a silent fallback to blindness.

## No spec decode

The GGUF has no MTP tensors (the same fact that made SGLang's NEXTN a 0.00
ghost), and the cross-model DFlash draft
(`/home/dank/models/DFlash-Qwen35/qwen3.5-9b-dflash-Q8_0.gguf`) is an
optimization candidate, not a default — acceptance has to be measured on this
traffic first. The bats seam fails if a draft flag ships unannounced.

## Rollback

|Target|How|
|---|---|
|Previous shape: 3 × 180,224 + q8_0 V (2026-10-02)|`scripts/frank-small.env` `CTX_SIZE=540672 PARALLEL=3 CACHE_TYPE_V=q8_0` (measured 21,684 MiB used, 2,441 free) and `contextWindow: 180224` in `models.yml` — choose it when three simultaneous conversations matter more than per-slot window or exact V|
|Q6_K, same runtime|`scripts/frank-small.env` `MODEL_FILE=/home/dank/models/MiMo-Q6K/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B-Q6_K.gguf` (7,793,710,624 B, still on disk) and the deployer's `LLM_SMALL_MODEL_FILE` default. Q6_K needs ~1.4 GiB more than Q5_K_M, so pair the rollback with `CTX_SIZE` 49,152 tokens lower or `MMPROJ_FILE=`|
|Two 262,144 windows|`CTX_SIZE=524288 PARALLEL=2 CACHE_TYPE_V=q8_0` (measured 20,190 MiB used, 4,386 free **with q8_0 V** — with f16 V the same shape is 16,384 MiB of KV + ~7,986 non-KV and does not fit) and `contextWindow: 262144` in `models.yml` — choose it when a single conversation needs the native window|
|Vision off|`MMPROJ_FILE=` in the env file; the deployer gate then has to be satisfied too, so point `LLM_SMALL_MMPROJ` at any real projector file or drop the gate in the same commit|
|SGLang + INT8|[[frank-small-sglang-mimo-v26]] — venv and old unit/env/serve trio still in place; the INT8 payload was staged to `/home/dank/.AGENTTRASH/20261002-retired-llm-payloads/` on 2026-10-02, so restore it there or re-fetch with `old/download-frank-small-sglang-int8.sh`|

## When it misbehaves

- Port 7771 dark: `journalctl -u frank-small -n 50`; the serve script exits 1
  naming the missing file if the binary or GGUF moved.
- `No CUDA GPUs are available`: the 3090 vanished from the bus or the UVM node
  is missing — `nvidia-modprobe -u -c=0` (the serve script runs it).
- Requests queue behind each other: two concurrent long generations are the
  slot ceiling by contract (2026-10-03 shape); a third waits for a slot to
  free (the mechanism measured on the 3-slot shape: 1.7 s for three, 3.0 s for
  the fourth).
- `400 … exceeds the available context size (200704 tokens)`: the conversation
  outgrew ONE slot. This is not pool exhaustion — the pool is 401,408 tokens
  and the per-slot window is the binding limit. Shorten the prompt, compact,
  or roll back to the 262,144 shape above.
- Vision answers a color it never saw: the client sent `images` instead of an
  `image_url` content part (see *Client contract*).
- Slow decode after a CTX or quant change: check `nvidia-smi` — pushing KV out
  of VRAM into unified memory halves the rate silently.