Add the next incremental llama.cpp patch for default-off speculative batch-shape tracing and record the Phase 18 red/green and inference-gate results.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record Phase 17 source inspection: MTP verification rows change hard graph dimensions, padding is not a safe shortcut, and any future work should start with shape instrumentation before an opt-in scheduler experiment.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Mark the rejected-branch disposition as not taken because Phase 4 was kept as patch 0050 with recorded md5, op, perf, and mirror gates.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record the Phase 8 safety rerun, canonical transcript md5 gates, full and ragged MUL_MAT_ID op gates, and the no-production-patch decision for metadata-only fused dispatch work.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record the default-off Global-Ai32 implementation, exact md5 gates, GB10 A/B regression, rejected diff artifact, and the resulting stop decision for GDN kernel work on GB10.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record the shared-A/Ai GB10 cost model, the GO decision for one default-off f32 Ai prototype, and the Phase 13 implementation plan.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record the Phase 11 default-off QS-early GDN experiment, its canonical md5 gates, the same-session GB10 A/B regression, and the rejected diff artifact.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record the default-off C32 slab experiment, its md5 gates, the dense tail-row fix, and the performance regression that rejects the source patch.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record the Phase 10 current-M5 prefill baseline and the source inspection finding that C32 M5 needs a real U-staging implementation rather than a launcher-only shortcut.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record the Phase 9 MTP smoke gate, mirror the fork patch that disables backend sampling for MTP drafts, and scope the follow-up C32 slab GDN prefill phase.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Mark the Phase 6 serving classifier complete, preserve the old parity final as historical, and scope Phase 7 source candidates with explicit md5 and op gates.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record both-engine serving nsys buckets, rejected sampler short-circuit, and rejected GDN/MMQ env grids for the GB10 parity work.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record the Phase 5 Wq shared-memory padding experiment, its gates, sub-threshold benchmark gain, and the decision to ship no 0051 patch.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Mirror fork commit d9b9be0be as patch 0050 and record the Phase 4 W4A16 shared-memory padding gates, benchmarks, and mirror verification.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record the Phase 3 scale-broadcast experiment, its md5 and MUL_MAT_ID gates, the prefill regression, and the decision to ship no 0050 patch.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Mirror fork commit 7dfa0e175 as patch 0049 and record the Phase 2 GB10 W4A16 shape sweep, md5 gates, MUL_MAT_ID checks, and mirror verification.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Mirror the fork-first W4A16 packed tile metadata commit into the LocalAI paged patch series, record the Phase 1 benchmark result, and keep the implementation plan checked off.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record the clean forced W4A16 baseline, default comparison, selected metadata target, and completed plan checkpoint for the GB10 parity reopen.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Record the clean DGX build retry, binary provenance, canonical greedy md5 gates, and completed plan steps for the GB10 parity reopen.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Add the read-only DGX artifact review for the Phase 0 parity reopen, including supported paged measurements and missing vLLM difference-method evidence.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Add the clean llama.cpp fork state, base merge point, patch count, and tree-match result for the Phase 0 parity reopen workflow.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Add the Superpowers implementation plan for the GB10 parity reopen, including Phase 0 provenance, decode repro, W4A16 kill gates, and later kernel workstream entry criteria.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Add a phased follow-up spec for challenging the GB10 vLLM-parity closure, including provenance gates, W4A16/GDN/MoE workstreams, and subagent ownership boundaries.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
Reconcile the paged backend pin prose with the current Makefile pin, mark the 0044 patch tracking note as resolved, and add DGX Docker worker idleness to the benchmark preflight.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5
The fork mudler/llama.cpp branch localai-paged is the canonical source of
truth for all paged-backend kernel/patch work. Always update it FIRST: commit
the change on the fork branch and push it, then regenerate the LocalAI patch
series (backend/cpp/llama-cpp-localai-paged/patches/paged/) from the fork via
git format-patch so the series is a 1:1 drift-free mirror of the branch. Never
edit the LocalAI patch files directly, and never add a patch with no
corresponding fork-branch commit. The series is a derivative; the fork is the
source. The fork branch is also where the build and the per-path bit-exact md5
gate actually run, so it is the only place a change is truly validated.
Codified in two places:
- .agents/llama-cpp-localai-paged-backend.md: new "Fork-first workflow
(MANDATORY)" section at the top of the patch/pin-sync material, plus the
"Encapsulating your work" bullet now points at it.
- backend/cpp/llama-cpp-localai-paged/docs/PARITY_HANDOFF.md: strengthened the
hard-gate (section 2.5) into "Fork-first is MANDATORY", and corrected a stale
numbering example (fork 51168c5ee "patch 0044" maps to worktree 0044, not the
f32-only M5 which is worktree 0047).
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-4.8 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
The fork mudler/llama.cpp branch localai-paged is the canonical source of
truth for the paged-backend patch series. This file is the git format-patch
of fork commit 51168c5ee ("feat(paged): fused gated RMSNorm + SiLU gate-mul
CUDA op (patch 0044)"), verified byte-identical to that commit's format-patch
output. The full on-disk series applies clean in numeric order on the pinned
base and the resulting tree is byte-identical to the fork commit tree (tree
hash a73d759350277532a14e853e1fe78f08bbb74ce8), so the LocalAI series is a
drift-free 1:1 mirror of the fork branch.
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-4.8 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Ground-check follow-up to 2431090ff. Two factual corrections:
- Section 7 worktree line had the ahead/behind counts swapped ("25 ahead,
197 behind"); the branch is actually ~199 ahead / 25 behind origin/master.
- Discrepancy item 5 flagged only the MoE CDEF PAGED_GATE_MD5 (0921716...);
the dense run is symmetric (COMBINED_DEFINITIVE.txt records ecfe924d... for
dense, which likewise differs from the canonical dense gate 5951a5b4). Both
CDEF values come from combined_definitive.sh's own gate command, not the
canonical bit-exact gate in section 3.3, so neither is sanctioned and both
must be KL-validated.
Everything else in the handoff verified accurate: fork branch localai-paged
HEAD 51168c5ee (patch 0044) on dgx:~/llama-paged-fork, dev-tree HEAD a7d439e,
all md5/KL numbers, the 86%/1078/924 decode record, bench env, and all
referenced file/artifact paths.
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-4.8 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Adds docs/PARITY_HANDOFF.md: the operational how-to for an agent with zero
context picking up the GB10 vLLM-parity work. Complements VLLM_PARITY_FINAL.md
(the why/record) with TL;DR state, the hard gates (per-path bit-exact md5,
KL-gate, no LLAMA_MAX_BATCH_TOKENS, fork-is-canonical), a copy-pasteable
operational quickstart (ssh/lock/build/bench + the --cuda-graph-trace=node
decode-profiling rule that caused 4 wrong analyses), the complete tested-and-
rejected lever map, methodology lessons, the three forward directions, and a
key file/artifact index with the open discrepancies to reconcile.
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-4.8 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
The decode-serving section characterized the high-N gap as "BW-floored, vLLM
pays equally / 56-68%". A clean uncontended graph-node-traced profile
(dgx ~/highN_prof2 + ~/highN_vllm, 2026-06-30) shows that was a profiling
artifact: decode runs as a replayed CUDA graph, and nsys without
--cuda-graph-trace=node collapses each replay into one opaque launch, so every
prior decode decomposition (159 us/tok, "host-bound", "5.4x more efficient")
was wrong. Corrected via --cuda-graph-trace=node + the ntg=64-minus-ntg=16
difference method.
Real picture (paged npl=256): 99% GPU-busy (idle 1.4%), NOT host-bound. GDN
recurrent scan 553 us/tok (51%, linear in batch, dominant), NVFP4 expert GEMM
254 (23%), bf16 proj 73 (7%), elementwise 57, SSM conv 31. Gap reconciled:
vLLM-server 1177 -> vLLM true GPU-steady 1078 (chunked-prefill overlap inflates
its window ~8pt) -> llama GPU-steady 924 (= 86% of 1078) -> llama-server 718
(61%, the ~17pt S3-recoverable serving graph-reuse overhead). So vs vLLM's true
GPU-steady decode we are ~86%, not 56%. GDN is a shared BW floor where paged
leads (83% vs 79% of 273 GB/s peak; both 1.17-1.18x for 2x batch).
The residual ~14pt is vLLM's mature fused kernels (Marlin MoE +11ms, Triton
elementwise +10ms); both ggml fusions rejected: act-quant-into-MMQ -79.4%
(ggml MMQ re-quantizes y per row-tile x stream-k split, no single-pass tiling),
norm+quant+silu infeasible via ggml_cuda_can_fuse. Added rejected levers:
Q8_0/FP8 projection (regime error, closes <=6%; vLLM FP8-proj confirmed from
hf_quant_config.json MIXED_PRECISION), the two decode fusions; refined BV-block
GDN occupancy to -1.04% (wave-hidden).
Revised verdict: PREFILL genuinely capped (36-43%, not graph-replayed so real);
DECODE-SERVING near-parity ~86% of vLLM true GPU-steady (headline 56% was a
measurement/operating-point artifact). GB10-vs-datacenter framing kept.
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-4.8 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Add docs/VLLM_PARITY_FINAL.md: the standing, never-re-litigate record of the
exhaustive GB10 (sm_121) vLLM-parity investigation for the Qwen3.6 NVFP4 hybrid
models. Captures the definitive same-session both-engine benchmark (prefill
S_PP, decode/serving per-seq + aggregate, TTFT, PEAK_GB, paged-as-%-of-vLLM for
both the MoE 35B-A3B and dense 27B models), the complete lever map (every
prefill-GEMM, prefill-GDN, decode and serving/engine attempt with its verdict
and key number), the structural floors (LPDDR5x bandwidth, FP4-MMQ optimality,
GDN O(C^2) intra-chunk + serial recurrence, vLLM's HBM-tuned FLA/Marlin), the
shipped bit-exact wins, and the parity verdict: parity is a hardware ceiling on
GB10, not missing optimizations; the path to parity is datacenter Blackwell.
Every number cites its artifact (dgx:~/bench/COMBINED_DEFINITIVE.txt, the
marlin_gate / gdn_p1_ab A/Bs, PREFILL_GEMM_RESULTS, VLLM_PARITY_LEVER_MAP,
DECODE_SERVING_SCOPE, the patch headers); figures not pinned to an artifact are
marked estimated. Add a section-9 summary + link in the backend README.
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-4.8 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
The 0044/0045 patches were exported from the old bf16/hybrid dev tree and no
longer apply on the f32-only series (0026 ssm_bf16_tau is dropped), so the
build broke at `git apply`. Re-sync the vendored series to the now
feature-complete fork branch mudler/llama.cpp:localai-paged, which is the
canonical source (pin 0ed235ea + the paged patch commits in order).
- git rm the dev-tree-based 0044 (GDN M5, bf16-machinery base) and 0045
(Marlin W4A16 offline-repack, not part of the fork branch).
- Add the fork branch's newest commit (2c32ab8b7, "GDN M5 tensor-core
chunked-scan prefill, f32-only re-port") as 0047, generated with a single
git format-patch off that branch. It sequences after 0046 (its parent on
the branch) and recovers the prefill win 0044 encoded (+3.5% S_PP @npp512,
+17.7% @npp2048), bit-exact per-path (test-backend-ops GATED_DELTA_NET
46/46 default and force-M5; greedy md5 default-on == M5-forced == canonical).
- Track patch 0046 (dense-prefill geometry gate), which was on disk but never
committed, so the series is complete in git.
- README: patch-table header 0001-0046 -> 0001-0047, replace the 0044 row with
the f32-only 0047 row, fix the dangling 0044 prose references, note the
bf16 M6/M7/M8 variants are not part of this f32-only series, and add a
maintenance bullet that the series is now generated from the fork branch so
there is no more patch-export drift.
Verified: on a pristine llama.cpp at pin 0ed235ea the full series 0001-0043,
0046, 0047 applies clean in sorted order with the Makefile's exact
`git apply --verbose` method (37/37 OK), and the resulting tree is
byte-identical to the fork branch tip 2c32ab8b7.
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-4.8 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
nsys cross-engine decomposition: the MoE prefill 64% gap vs vLLM is engine plumbing, not the kernel (GPU 97% busy, 443 vs 197 us/tok). Three buckets: per-expert W4A4 M-fragmentation (58%), GDN scan (24%), f32<->bf16 casts (15%). Offline-repack (0045) and verbatim vLLM-marlin port both trail FP4-MMQ via wrapper overhead, kept default-off as recorded negatives.
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-4.8 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Land the tensor-core forms of the chunked gated-DeltaNet prefill scan (0031)
as a single GDN_TC-selected build and ship the M5 variant (full TC form-T
solve + state-update mma) default-ON when LLAMA_KV_PAGED is set.
The dispatch defaults GDN_TC=5 and GDN_CHUNK_MIN=64 under paged KV (both
env-overridable; OFF/INT_MAX when not paged, so stock/non-paged stays
regression-free). GDN_CHUNK_MIN is the per-call engage threshold and stays > 1
so decode (1 tok/call) keeps the sequential recurrence; 64 was tuned from a
{1,32,64,128,256} sweep (32/64/128 all win on prefill, 256 barely fires because
the MoE-prefill per-call count is < 256, 1 collapses decode S_TG ~25%).
Measured GB10, q36-35b-a3b-nvfp4, LLAMA_KV_PAGED=1 LLAMA_MOE_FORCE_GRAPHS=1,
llama-batched-bench -ngl 99 -fa on -ntg 4 -npl 32:
-npp 512 S_PP 2208.96 -> 2286.5 t/s (+3.5%, mean of 3 interleaved A/B)
-npp 2048 S_PP 2021.5 -> 2379.8 t/s (+17.7%)
Decode S_TG unchanged (~399 vs ~397 t/s, within noise).
Bit-exactness (per-path greedy md5, n=48 --temp 0 --seed 1, paged): default-on
== M5-forced == canonical on the gate prompt - MoE 8cb0ce23, dense 5951a5b4.
test-backend-ops GATED_DELTA_NET 94/94 vs CPU with M5 forced (incl. multi-chunk
up to n_tokens=256). On a long MoE prompt the default (M5 fires at >=64 tokens)
and the sequential path agree word-for-word until one benign greedy token-flip;
dense is byte-identical. The chunked scan is a NEW per-path result (different FP
reduction order), NMSE-validated benign.
CUDA-only, gencode arch=compute_121a,code=sm_121a (GB10 / sm_121a). README
sections 3 (0044 row, 0031 superseded note) and 5 (dev-notes verdict) updated.
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-4.8 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
