Wire paged, non-contiguous fixed-size BLOCK placement into the real
llama.cpp KV cache (find_slot), behind env LLAMA_KV_PAGED, and validate
Gate 0 on a real GGUF: Qwen3-0.6B greedy generation is TOKEN-IDENTICAL to
the contiguous cache while its KV is physically scattered across permuted
blocks (cells 0-15, 144-159, 32-47, ...). Proven non-contiguous via
LLAMA_KV_PAGED_DEBUG, not a silent fallback.
This retires the correctness premise of paged attention IN THE MODEL (not
just at the ggml-op level): attention is invariant to physical KV placement,
because reads use per-cell pos/seq metadata for masking. The patch lives at
patches/0001-paged-kv-block-placement.patch (against llama.cpp 0253fb21f).
Scope: storage/placement layer, single sequence. Remaining (P4): the
gather-read compute path (attend only a seq's own blocks) for the throughput
win, and the multi-sequence driver. README updated with repro + status.
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-4.8 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Capture verified state (P0 manager parity, P1 ggml write/gather, P2 attention
numerics 7.5e-08, P3 capacity 9.2x + prefix-sharing 11.3x) and the exact
remaining work: wire build_attn_paged into llama-graph.cpp and validate
token-identical generation on Qwen3-0.6B (Gate 0), then win-2 throughput.
Records the integration seams (create_memory, find_slot, get_k/get_v,
build_attn, mask) and the honest caveats (unified cache already shares a
pool; vLLM's classic kernel is deprecated) so the next session starts warm.
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-4.8 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
