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- a superseded-claims table, and measured negatives not to re-chase
The superseded table earns its place immediately: the heretic2 runbook tells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claim earns a dated superseded row rather than a silent edit.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.
Fleet/colo hosts must reach gitea over the internal route (ana-docker
container git-SSH at 10.250.50.70:222), not the public gitea.phasefinal.com:22
which fail2bans the host's egress IP and silently wedges webhook auto-deploys.
Bit irv-ml1's arbo deploy 2026-06-13.
New runbook captures the three-phase process:
Phase 1 — Drop --append-only via DSM Container Manager web UI
Phase 2 — sudo resticprofile forget --prune --verbose on each of
nh3-docker, nh3-dev, irv-ml1 (interactive sudo per host)
Phase 3 — Restore --append-only via DSM
Why each phase looks the way it does, what to expect (largely no-op
runs for the first 6 months while no snapshots have aged out of the
keep window), how to verify each phase non-destructively (curl 401
on the rest-server root proves the container's up + serving), what
to do if Phase 2 fails with `repository is configured as append-only`
(skipped Phase 1 / DSM didn't apply), and the path to future
automation (find docker bin path on DSM, NOPASSWD-lock syncuser to
the specific recreate command).
Includes a "last run history" table seeded with today's first
post-pipeline run (no-op, irv-ml1 only had 3 snapshots due to the
04-25→27 CUDA stall).
Cross-referenced from docs/README.md (runbook tree), docs/
orientation.md (where-to-look table), and STATUS.md item 9 (which
now points at the runbook + records the next-round date 2026-07-27).
Bundles the inventory expansion since 2026-04-22:
- New host dirs (READMEs + ssh-target where dir name doesn't resolve):
ana-nas, ana-wg, esh-vm-db, nh3-nas, pbs-ana, pbs-nh3.
- New PFI VM snapshots (registered + key-installed 2026-04-23):
ana-filebot, pfi-ana-webhost, pfi-postgres, pfi-pteradactyl,
pfi-tacticalrmm, sf-ana-container, sfsrv-ana (system + proxmox).
- servers/irv-ml1: ONBOARDING.md (the first-time setup notes from when
the host was brought into the fleet) + ssh-target (10.100.79.3 over
the WG tunnel — name doesn't DNS-resolve from this workstation).
- servers/{ana-ml2,pfi-pve,sf-r630}/README.md: updates to capture BMC
IPs, the iDRAC vs OS hostname distinction (sf-r630 hardware =
sfsrv-ana OS), and the ana-ml2 Supermicro BMC (10.250.250.50,
distinct from the Dell R750xs iDRAC).
- configs/homepage/docker.yaml: irv-ml1-docker provider added so
homepage auto-discovers irv-ml1's stacks over the WG tunnel.
- docs/orientation.md: narrative fleet overview written for fresh
Claude sessions — sites, backup architecture, governing principles,
gotchas, where-to-look guide. Pointed at from CLAUDE.md.
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