Quants are hard-fought and we keep re-paying for the same lessons. A survey
found quant knowledge scattered across 18 files in four trees, with three
documents having independently discovered and recorded overlapping
"landmines" sections — and one of them now actively misleading.
Adds docs/pfi/model-quantization-playbook.md as the single home for the
TRANSFERABLE lessons, with per-model artifacts demoted to worked examples
that link up to it. Contents:
- scheme decision table, incl. that a literal "W4A8" NVFP4 checkpoint is
unservable on vLLM (two legal activation settings, FP8 is not one)
- the reference mixed-precision recipe and the three parts of it that are
load-bearing and easy to drop
- the recurring landmines, ordered by cost: the loader-class trap
(rediscovered THREE times), the three separate ways to lose the MTP head,
toolchain deadlocks, vision configs, memory/device placement
- pipeline shape: prove targets before spending GPU time; mandatory
post-steps that verify rather than assume
- the acceptance gate, and the three ways measurement has lied to us —
prefix caching faking both speed metrics, prompt_logprobs going uniform
under speculative decoding, and a 0600 .env making compose silently no-op
- hardware/co-residency, including that a SMALLER model can starve its
neighbour because gpu-memory-utilization is a fraction of the whole card
- a superseded-claims table, and measured negatives not to re-chase
The superseded table earns its place immediately: the heretic2 runbook tells
readers to use modelopt because "compressed-tensors can't load the BF16 MTP
head, 0% acceptance". That symptom was real but the cause was not the format
-- it was the missing re:^mtp.* ignore entry. compressed-tensors gives
47.7-83.2% acceptance in production. A fresh session following that doc would
be sent down the modelopt path that current memory calls dependency hell, so
the runbook now carries a stale-warning header pointing here.
Wires discovery: an orientation.md "Where to look for what" row, pointers
from the gen-seat / heretic2 / mistral artifacts, and a CLAUDE.md maintenance
rule so the playbook gets fed instead of going stale -- model-agnostic
lessons land in the playbook, model-specific ones stay put, and a wrong
claim earns a dated superseded row rather than a silent edit.
Motivated by Qwen3.8 having just released: the next model swap will need a
requant, and this is what that session should read first.
Quantize a HF-format Mistral Small 4 (Mistral3ForConditionalGeneration MoE) to
NVFP4 with the vision tower intact, then convert HF NVFP4 -> Mistral native so
vLLM can serve it (there is no HF Mistral4 serving path in any vLLM version).
Built + validated end-to-end on ana-ml2 for the abliterated character-model
successor (darkc0de/Mistral-Small-4-119B-2603-heretic): quant -> dry-run (clean
vs the official native NVFP4 reference) -> convert -> serve-test (loads on the
native loader, correct text, vision functional).
Converter scaffold came from worldtree-codex (bf16 bin maps + fused-expert
split); fixed here: NVFP4 layer regexes (keep the `model.` prefix) + non-mmap
shard reads (ZFS large-mmap ENOMEM). nvfp4_quant.py is local. README documents
the pipeline + every gotcha that cost a failed run. Homed here per operator
direction (not Worldtree).
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