2ec8f42297
§3.11. Three consecutive "what about X as a base?" questions in one session,
each answerable in minutes, none of which had been asked before a 7-hour
training window was committed. Writing the check down so it runs first.
1. does it fit for TRAINING - BF16 weights against the real measured peak,
not the weight figure (Gemma-4 is 48.1 GiB of weights and peaks at
79.7 GiB at mb2/seq-16k). Model-line names lie: "Mistral Small 4" is 119 B,
238 GB in BF16, more than both cards combined. QLoRA is not an escape
hatch for MoE - bitsandbytes walks nn.Linear and fused 3-D experts are not
that.
2. if MoE - does the serving engine implement get_expert_mapping. Zero means
LoRA cannot be served at all. gemma4*.py -> 0; deepseek_v2, mixtral,
glm4_moe, ernie45_moe -> present.
3. does the model class support LoRA - and GREP THE CLASS, NOT THE FILE.
Point 3 has teeth and I nearly got it wrong twice in one turn. mistral.py greps
as SupportsLoRA=0 and is fully LoRA-capable via LlamaForCausalLM.
mistral_large_3.py greps as 0 for both and inherits get_expert_mapping from
DeepseekV3ForCausalLM. Capability is inherited; a file-level grep misses it and
only MRO resolution answers it. Same class of error as asserting a substring
instead of an effective value.
Worked results recorded for the three candidates evaluated:
Gemma-4 26B-A4B fits, no expert mapping -> trainable, MERGE-ONLY
Mistral Small 4 119B 238 GB, has mapping -> servable, NOT trainable here
Ministral 3 14B ~28 GB, dense, inherited -> passes all three
Adds a fourth glance at architecture shape, since it predicts how much of this
playbook applies at all: uniform head_dim <= 128 with no sliding window keeps
both flash and cuDNN reachable and makes §3.1/§3.3 moot, while mixed head dims
plus a sliding window is exactly what forces dense O(n^2) attention onto
Ampere-generation kernels for 65% of the step.
docs/
Navigation map for the documentation tree. New session? Read
orientation.md first — it's the narrative overview
of the fleet, backup architecture, governing principles, and gotchas,
and it points at everything else.
Tree
docs/
├── orientation.md # start here — fleet overview + where-to-look guide
├── runbooks/ # ops runbooks (recovery, deployment phases)
│ ├── disaster-recovery.md
│ ├── nh3-prune-ritual.md
│ └── pbs-deployment.md
└── pfi/ # PFI-specific reference (services, models, VMs)
├── docker-stack.md
├── model-list.md
├── proxmox-vms.md
├── recommended-model-settings.md
├── vm-102-matrix-appservice.md
└── vm-102-matrix-synapse.md
What goes where
runbooks/— step-by-step ops procedures. Anything you'd reach for during an incident or while standing up new infrastructure. Examples: disaster recovery (blast-radius tiers + restoration steps), PBS deployment (9-phase rollout). New runbook → new file here.pfi/— PFI-specific reference material that's too narrow for the top-level CLAUDE.md but doesn't change incident response. AI model inventory, recommended inference settings, Matrix bridge config, Proxmox VM map. New stable reference → new file here.- Top-level (
docs/orientation.md,docs/README.md) — narrative guides about the workspace itself, not about specific infra.
Cross-references
- Fleet topology + servers table: top-level
CLAUDE.md. - Open work + recent milestones: top-level
STATUS.md. - Durable cross-session facts:
~/.claude/projects/-home-lkraven-development-eshpfi-management/memory/.
Conventions
- Markdown, GitHub-flavored. CommonMark renders fine in most viewers.
- File names are lowercase-kebab-case, descriptive. No dates in filenames — git history covers that.
- One topic per file. If a file grows past ~500 lines, look for a natural split before adding more.
- No checked-in binaries or checksums. Build/release artifacts belong
in a build pipeline or
tools/, notdocs/.