Setup asks for webhooks, but one left empty was never mentioned again: a
lost node or a judge down was told nobody. With no notify.webhooks in the
cluster's settings, ctl status and the console's Overview say so, and how
to set one. BACKLOG: the judge's refusal after a placement change, tried
again on idle VMs, did not happen; a cold judge's first answer is 2-3x
slower but inside its budget.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Issue #3 asked for commands to stop and start the system, and 05aa21c gave
only one machine's services. Now:
- llmgw stop sets serving.stopped in the cluster's settings, live: the
reconciler wants every model at no replicas, freeing every GPU, and the
gateway answers every POST under /v1/ with 503 system_stopped. The control
planes, agents and mirror keep running, and no model's definition changes.
- llmgw start clears it; every model is placed again as it asks.
- llmgw restart has every agent restart over its stream (RestartAgent), then
the other control planes over ssh, standbys before a leader, then this
one; engines keep serving.
- llmgw status is the cluster's summary, saying when it is stopped.
One machine's services moved to llmgw service status|start|stop|restart.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
guard.enabled (unset is on) makes every policy check nothing while false,
live: llmgw ctl guard off/on set it in the cluster's settings, and ctl
status, ctl guard list and the guardrails page say when they are off.
A refusal by a judge names the hazard it saw - judge: S6,Specialized
Advice - and the verdict is kept with the request in a new usage column,
guard_rule, shown by ctl request, the request log and the guardrails page.
llmgw ctl guard judge ask has a judge read a text, past the cache, and shows
its raw answer and how it is read; the endpoint is kept out of the audit so
no text is recorded.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
llmgw ctl guard judge status lists each judge model the policies ask:
in the catalog, as a judge, replicas ready, its last failure to answer, and
what is wrong in words. enable serves the missing one through model serve -
Llama Guard 3 1B on CPUs, role guard, under the name the policies give it -
with --replace for a model of that name that is not a judge; the console has
it under Do. GET /api/v1/guard/judges, and the summary's judges, put the
problem on ctl status and the console's Overview.
A Llama Guard file served from the mirror page is added as a judge, under
the name the policies ask, rather than as a model clients use the policies
never find. ctl says plainly when the API answers with a page.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A binary installed by hand made ctl upgrade say this machine already ran
the release and leave the old server running. And a node had 15 seconds
to answer an upgrade the control plane gives five minutes, so a node that
was upgrading stopped the run.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A control plane being stopped held every agent's stream for the thirty
seconds of a graceful shutdown, so the standby led within four seconds and
had no nodes for thirty. The agent server is now closed, not drained. A
control plane that loses its lease while it lives on lets its agents go,
rather than keeping nodes the new leader cannot reach.
ctl status and the console's Overview say which control plane leads, which
stand by, and whether the floating address is on the leader. The console
adds a control plane (Do → Add a control plane), asking for the machine and
the floating address. server add says when the mirror would refuse the new
control plane.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Discovery reports a card in MIG mode as its instances instead of the whole
card, on both paths: nvidia-smi (-L names them, -q -x gives their memory,
ids and processes) and NVML (GetMigMode, GetMaxMigDeviceCount,
GetMigDeviceHandleByIndex, behind an interface so it is tested with a fake).
Each instance has its MIG UUID, its own memory, and a class from the card's
and the profile: a100-80g-mig-3g.40gb. Placement numbers instances
1000 + 100 x card + instance and every view shows them as card/migN.
A replica on MIG runs on exactly one instance: a process opens one MIG
device and instances have no NVLink between them, so tp, pp, gpus or nodes
above one on a MIG class are refused in catalog validation and again in
placement, and the planner offers one instance or none. The agent gives
the engine CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=MIG-<uuid> (no Vulkan device variable on
MIG). Memory and processes are per instance; heat, power and wear the
card's; utilisation is left out rather than reported as zero. A card in MIG
mode with nothing carved stays out of placement with the reason, and
llmgw doctor reports each card's mode and instances and warns of the states
in which nothing can run. ctl nodes, ctl status, the console and the plan
count devices by class. docs/install.md has a MIG section.
Written against fakes of nvidia-smi and NVML output; not yet run on MIG
hardware.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
init --patroni user@host ... installs PostgreSQL, Patroni and etcd on the
given machines over ssh, with this one as the third etcd vote, makes the role
and database, and moves the store in use into the cluster. Each step checks
first, so it changes nothing on a cluster that is up. For a store of several
hosts the control plane publishes each member's role, state and lag from
Patroni, a stopped member as missing, prints it in ctl status, and alerts on
it. Making an administrator on PostgreSQL sent a bool to an integer column;
it sends an integer now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
On the live cluster kev-0.5b — an architecture the nodes' llama.cpp did not
know — was started 155 times in eight hours, failing the same way each time,
and phi-4, which fitted on no node, logged "no placement" 250 times in two
days. Neither showed up anywhere an operator looked: the backoff never gave
up, no metric said a model was failing or unplaceable, and the one alert for
a model with nothing serving could not fire, because its series was published
only while a replica was ready.
After five failures in a row a model is parked: not placed again until its
definition changes — a new source or profile — or `llmgw ctl retry` is run.
Status, the model list and the admin API show it with its last error. The
placement warning is logged when its reason changes or every ten minutes.
A request for a parked or unplaceable model is answered at once with why,
rather than "loading; retry shortly", which a client retries forever. Each
request still clears the previous placement result and triggers a fresh
attempt, so a model that fits once room is made is not refused on a stale
answer; the router waits for that attempt, not for its full activation
window.
Metrics now cover model health (desired, ready at 0 for what should run,
consecutive start failures, parked, unplaceable), engine installs per node,
leadership, and certificate expiry read from disk at each scrape, with alerts
for each. `ctl status` counts a model against what it should have now, so an
on-demand model that was asked for and fitted nowhere no longer reads as
satisfied.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Storage will be different at every installation — Lustre, NFS over RDMA, an
image exported with SRP or NVMe-oF, local NVMe, an rsync — so llmgw observes
it rather than managing it. An agent told which directories to look in
reports what it can see; how the files got there is nobody's business here,
and a node told nothing reports nothing and behaves exactly as every node
did before this existed.
That fact buys two things. Placement prefers a node that already holds the
model over one that must first move tens of gigabytes, as a preference and
never a filter: fetching them is a valid answer, and refusing to place would
turn a slow start into no start at all. And ctl status shows what each
fabric holds.
Per fabric because fabrics are not connected to one another. Weights in
ib-a are not weights in ib-b — the only path between them is the management
network — so a model seeded into one fabric leaves the rest of the cluster
unable to serve it without a slow copy, and nothing said so before now. One
shared filer counts the same as twenty local copies, because "can this
fabric serve it" is the question being asked.
Three distinctions the tests hold to, because each is a way to get this
quietly wrong. A node that was never asked to look must rank with one that
looked and has nothing, or enabling the feature on a single node would
drain every other. An empty directory is not weights, because a
half-finished download looks exactly like one and would send placement to a
node whose engine then fails to load. And local storage is never mistaken
for shared: a filer read as local costs an unnecessary copy, while local
read as shared would have the cluster believe a model is everywhere when it
is on one node.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two things a cluster with many nodes and many GPUs needs that were missing,
and they are the same thing seen from two distances.
Idle tracking. The control plane knew what was placed and whether it was
healthy, never whether anyone wanted it — so on a fleet with more models
than cards there was no way to answer the first question anyone asks, which
is what can I stop. The router is the only thing that knows, so it now
reports it: a timestamp written in Acquire, where a request already meets an
endpoint under a lock already held, and collected once a tick as a map. That
shape is the point. Per-request notification would be a firehose carrying
one bit — the newest timestamp wins — and this costs the same on four
replicas as on four hundred.
It travels through an interface in the direction opposite EndpointSink, for
the same reason that one exists: the control plane decides what should run,
the router knows whether anyone wants it, and neither should need to be in
the other's process to say so.
Unknown is kept distinct from idle throughout. A router that has just
restarted knows nothing, and a zero timestamp would be the oldest idle
replica in every comparison — so one restart would nominate an entire fleet
for eviction. Absent from the map, "-" in the table, negative in the JSON,
and IdleFor returns a second value rather than a duration anything could
act on by mistake.
ctl status. A per-node listing is right for four nodes and wrong for two
hundred: how full am I, what is broken, what is holding cards nobody is
using are aggregates, and reading them off a long table is a chore, which
means it gets skipped. Capacity per GPU class with usage bars, free whole
nodes per fabric — the number that decides whether a multi-node replica can
land, since free cards on the wrong fabric are not capacity for a model that
spans nodes — replica and model counts, models that cannot be placed, and
what has gone unasked-for. Derived from the same state the tables show, so
it cannot disagree with them.
Unhealthy GPUs count as neither used nor free, because counting them free is
how a cluster looks like it has room it does not.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
