model serve takes --projector, fetched beside the weights and loaded by
llama.cpp with --mmproj, and --format safetensors with --gpu-class and --tp,
which fetches the weights with their config and tokenizer and runs them on
vLLM. The console offers both, F switching between GGUF and original
weights. The mirror view is one row per version with its files on Enter.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
server add gives another machine this llmgw, a certificate, the
configuration and store address, lets it into the store through Patroni, and
starts it; --vip keeps a floating address on the leader with keepalived,
following a new /leader endpoint. Nodes learn every control plane from the
leader and notice a dead one by HTTP/2 ping instead of after the kernel's
fifteen minutes. The setup, console, node and init screens are drawn full
screen in one frame: title bar, sidebar, bordered panel, key bar, dialogs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A card with something else on it when the agent started stayed out of
placement after that process let go of it, until the agent restarted. The
agent now sends what processes other than its own engines hold on each card,
and the control plane replaces the registration verdict with it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every minute the agent reads nvidia-smi's full report, its NVLink error
counters and the kernel's XID lines. They are published per card,
shown on the node page and the GPU map, charted in Grafana, and five
alerts watch them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
They were read once, at agent start, and published unchanged since.
Each sample now carries utilisation, memory and bandwidth in use, the SM
clock and uncorrected ECC errors. The node page charts each card, the
cluster page the fleet by class, Grafana has a GPU row, and three GPU
alerts are added.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Each engine has a list of builds, best first, from what its project
publishes and how each was compiled: llama.cpp CUDA 13.3, CUDA 12.8
(driver 570 for the GPUs it ships as PTX), then Vulkan, never the CPU
build on an NVIDIA node; vLLM CUDA 13, then CUDA 12.9, and for GPUs
older than every build of the version asked for, the newest built for
them (V100: 0.19.1). The node takes the first its hardware meets and
that installs and computes on the GPU, moving on when one does not, and
reports the version it runs. GPU processes are read from nvidia-smi's
full report, so Vulkan engines count as on their GPU.
Refs #2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
tp on a llama.cpp GPU profile is read as gpus_per_node rather than
refused, and a Hugging Face repository page as a vLLM source as the
repository id, so models written that way are placed after the upgrade
instead of dropped from the catalog. Engines adopted after an upgrade
are checked for computing on their GPUs too.
Refs #2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Read from vLLM's release pipeline: every x86 build from 0.20.0 has
kernels for compute 7.5 and up, the CUDA 12.9 one included, and 0.19.1
is the last built for 7.0. PyPI's build is CUDA 13 from 0.20, not 0.26.
A V100 asked for a newer vLLM is refused, naming 0.19.1 for
engine_overrides; the CUDA 12.9 fallback is for older drivers on
Turing and newer. The cu129 wheel is found among the release's assets,
since its manylinux tag differs between versions.
Refs #2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A node that cannot run the CUDA 13 build installs the same version's
CUDA 12.9 build from vLLM's GitHub release, with PyTorch's cu129 torch;
the install computes on the GPU before it counts. The build can be
chosen per node — auto, cu13, cu129, none — on the cluster page, with
ctl engine-build, or over the admin API; the control plane keeps the
choice and tells the node at once.
Refs #2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The explorer fetches a safetensors set with its config and tokenizer;
the mirror gives out a version's manifest only once nothing is
downloading and every shard its index names is there, with each file's
sha256, which nodes check; mirror add takes several URLs; a repository
page is refused as a source.
Refs #2 (item 9).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
engine_overrides give nodes picked by GPU class, id or labels their own
engine versions; node add --disable-engine keeps one off a node; what
vLLM cannot do on a node is a warning rather than a refused node; the
CUDA requirement follows the version; a hand-named binary is no longer
replaced by an installed one.
Refs #2 (items 4 and 7).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
tp on a llama.cpp profile was a width nothing placed. gpus_per_node is
now the count: placement reserves that many cards on one node and the
engine splits layers across them. tp, pp and nodes are refused with
what to write instead.
Refs #2 (item 8).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
llama.cpp whose CUDA backend cannot load runs on the CPU without an
error. The CUDA build is now asked for its devices when installed, a
shard on GPUs must hold memory on each before it is ready, and
engine-check reports the devices. Shards get CUDA_DEVICE_ORDER=PCI_BUS_ID
so CUDA numbers GPUs as placement does.
Refs #2 (item 2).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
--lora with --lora-init-without-apply leaves an adapter's scale at 1,
and llama-server applies it at that scale to any request without a
"lora" list of its own: every plain request for the model was served
with its adapters on. Found live on qwen2.5-coder-7b-instruct. Each
adapter is now loaded with --lora-scaled FILE:0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A model's adapters are fetched by each node with its weights and loaded
unapplied at start; a request naming an adapter reaches the model's
replicas with llama.cpp's per-request lora field. Adapter names share the
model namespace, are listed, and follow allowlists on their own. The
router's config seed and pushed catalog now build the name map in one place.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every agent samples, at most every ten seconds: nvidia-smi's temperature,
HBM temperature, power draw, enforced limit and throttle reasons per GPU;
hwmon's CPU package and board inlet temperatures; and CPU package power
from RAPL's energy counters. Sent with heartbeats, published as metrics
and shown on the node page; unmeasured sensors are absent, never zero.
Observe-only, step 0 of docs/facility-aware-placement.md, which now
describes the agent source and what these readings can and cannot say.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A profile's cpu_cores is reserved out of its node's CPUs by placement, as
memory is, and becomes the engine's thread count. Agents report their CPU
count in registration and heartbeats. New CPU models must declare memory;
model views show reserved against measured memory with warnings, and
ctl model resources sets both for a stored model.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
CPU replicas start on half the machine's CPUs, not all of them: two busy
llama.cpp servers each spinning on all 8 vCPUs fell to 0.8 tok/s apiece,
where at 4 threads they keep 5.5. llamacpp.threads sets it per node.
Inference requests can be traced over OTLP/HTTP (tracing.endpoint), with
admission, schedule and upstream spans and traceparent sent to the engine.
Security: onboarding no longer puts the cluster root in the system trust
store and removes it where it was; the mirror's mutual-TLS API can be
limited to named certificates (--api-client); init.log no longer keeps the
administrator's password; a warning when auth is off on a public listen;
the recorded actor is sanitised and sudo-aware; Ray's dashboard is off, and
the remaining engine gaps are documented.
reconciler.go and agent.go are split by topic, the status mapping of each
failure is tested, and the plan's checklist is brought up to date.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every upgrade so far has been a script of mine copying a binary to each
machine over ssh, restarting it and polling until it came back — which is
the job, but not something the product could do, and which needed ssh into
every node.
`sudo llmgw ctl upgrade VERSION` on the control plane does it. This machine
first: the release for its platform, checked against the release's
checksums, the old binary kept beside it, llmgw-server restarted, and a wait
until every node that was ready has reconnected. Then each node in turn: the
control plane tells its agent the version over the stream it already holds;
the agent fetches and checks the release itself, swaps it in with a rename,
answers, and exits with status 75 so systemd starts the new binary. Engines
keep running, as for any agent restart, and are adopted again.
A node is done when it is back on the new version, ready, with as many ready
replicas as before; one that is not within the timeout stops the run before
the next node, so a bad release reaches one machine. Nodes already on the
version are skipped, so running it again resumes.
The fetch-and-verify is one package now, shared with onboarding's idea of
what a release version looks like.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A review of v0.10.4-rc.4, and a look at the live network, found:
- Alertmanager listening on every interface: from any node its API took
silences, with no login. Bound to loopback on the monitoring host, and the
monitoring README now installs it that way; Prometheus beside it is its only
client, and one Alertmanager needs no cluster port.
- Login and signup unbounded in memory. Each attempt runs argon2 with 64 MiB,
and nothing limited how many ran at once; the per-address throttle kept one
entry per address ever tried. Hashing now takes one of a few slots and
waits for one otherwise. The throttle expires entries whose window has
passed when it fills, and if it is still full it refuses new addresses:
evicting live ones instead would let a flood of made-up addresses reset the
throttle on the address actually being guessed.
- Metric labels taken from the request. A refused request counted the model
name it asked for, so any key holder could mint a series per request.
Requests are counted under the catalog's name, or "unknown".
- Two in code written this week. A SQLite backup made its snapshot with the
default mode in the listable backup directory, a full copy of the store
readable while the backup ran; it is now made in a private directory, and
the unit sets UMask=0077. And archive links were checked by name only, so
"a -> ." then "a/a/b -> ../.." passed and a file written through them landed
above the install directory, as root. Archives now unpack through os.Root,
and a link may only point at a file beside it — which every llama.cpp
b10991 archive, CPU and CUDA, was checked to follow.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
CI's test job has failed intermittently — two of three runs on some days —
while every run here passed, including six repetitions on one CPU under the
race detector with eight packages at once. The difference is a shared,
loaded Linux runner, and the tests most exposed to it are the ones that
sleep a fixed time and then assert:
- admission: idle admission bounded at 50ms of wall clock against a 1ms
tick, and a queued request checked for after a 50ms sleep;
- scrape: a 10ms scrape timeout, which on a slow runner reports the engine
unreachable and then the violation a second time, in a test that counts
one;
- supervisor: log lines, three lines of output and a removed state file
each checked after a fixed sleep, and an exited worker bounded at 1.5s;
- agent: a heartbeat checked for after four intervals.
Each now waits for its condition up to a deadline of seconds, and the two
wall-clock bounds are set against what they exist to distinguish — the
admission queue's tick raised to ten seconds, the exited worker bounded
below the five-second grace it must not wait out — rather than against how
fast this laptop is.
Without the CI logs this cannot be proven to be the failure; these are the
tests that fail when the machine is slow, and they no longer do.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Engines listen on every address their node has, with no key. Checked on the
live cluster: from a neighbouring node, a request straight to an engine's
port was answered — past the gateway's authentication, quotas and
accounting, by anyone who could reach the node.
Each replica's engine is now started with a key and refuses requests without
it. The key is derived from the replica id with an HMAC over a secret kept
in the store, rather than stored per replica: the router has to send the
right key to replicas this process never started — adopted after a restart,
or placed by the other control plane — and a function of a shared secret
gives that without a table to keep in step. A key taken from one node opens
that replica only. The secret is made on first use and copied with the rest
of the store when moving to PostgreSQL; a new one would lock the router out
of every running engine at the moment of the move.
The key reaches llama.cpp and vLLM through their environment
(LLAMA_API_KEY, VLLM_API_KEY) rather than their command line, which every
user on the node can read; SGLang only takes it as an argument. The agent's
readiness check, the router's proxy and its metrics scrape send it, the
client's own Authorization still never reaches the engine, and `ctl bench`
fetches the key of the replica it is pointed at from the admin API.
Engines started before this keep running without a key until their replica
is next started. With no store there is nowhere to keep the secret, and
engines start without one, with a warning.
Also formats two files that went in unformatted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The admin listener has no login. Reaching it is meant to mean holding the
control plane, so it binds to loopback and an operator reaches it over an
ssh tunnel — and so does every page open in that operator's browser. The
API decoded JSON whatever the Content-Type said, so a page could POST a
text/plain model definition, no preflight needed. A model's profile env
reached an engine the agent runs as root, unfiltered: LD_PRELOAD in a
definition was code execution on every node. A page that rebound its own
name to 127.0.0.1 could also read pprof's heap, which holds API keys.
The admin listener now answers only when Host is an address or localhost,
refuses requests a browser marks as cross-site (Origin, Sec-Fetch-Site),
and takes changes only as application/json, which no page can send across
origins without a preflight nobody grants. ctl sends that on every change,
bodiless DELETEs included; curl and ctl are otherwise unaffected.
Profile env that changes what runs rather than how — the dynamic loader's
LD_*, PATH, Python's PYTHON* start-up variables, BASH_ENV and their like —
is refused when a model is defined, and dropped again by the engine adapter
before the process starts, whatever sent the profile. None of the live
catalog's models sets any.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two places built a path from a name somebody else supplied and checked only
for slashes.
The mirror refused "a/b" as a model name but took "..", which is a single
path element too: a fetch for model ".." wrote beside the mirror root rather
than inside it. Model, version and file names now have to be one element
that does not start with a dot — the mirror's own checksum files are dotted
— on the fetch path and the API alike.
The agent took the engine version from the control plane as given and made
a directory of it under /opt/llmgw/engines, and a RemoveAll before replacing
one. A version of "../x" would have done both outside the install root, as
root. The agent now installs only versions that look like one — letters,
digits and ._+- — whatever the control plane sent.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
doctor checks a node alone, and every check can pass while two nodes still
cannot reach each other. ctl fabric-test A B asks B's agent for an
ib_write_bw server and A's for the client, adapter by adapter as NCCL pairs
them, one rail at a time, and grades each against its link's rate. It goes
through the agents' streams, so there is no SSH between nodes; the agent
installs perftest the first time, and names the RoCE v2 GID itself.
The result is read from perftest's table by its heading, not a column
number. Agents now list the requests they answer beyond the usual
(Register.features), and the control plane refuses a test on one too old to
answer instead of waiting minutes for it. The forwarding dispatcher carries
the new capability, and its test says so: a missing forward would have made
the command quietly unavailable in production.
Not yet run over real InfiniBand or RoCE; this cluster has neither.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A control plane of this release asks every node for vLLM. An agent of the
last one does not know how to install it, and answered "unsupported", so a
cluster half way through its upgrade showed every node as failing. Agents
now say which engines they can install (Register.installable_engines), and
are asked for no others; an agent that says nothing is asked for llama.cpp
alone, as it always was.
doctor reports the CPU's vector extensions, and warns when AVX2 is missing,
with the fix for a VM: the test node for node add was one, on QEMU's default
CPU model, where llama.cpp runs several times slower and nothing else looks
wrong. node add shows it, since it runs doctor.
The changelog's unreleased section was two releases' worth of sections one
after the other, with two lists of fixes and the upgrade notes in the
middle. It is one entry now: largest changes first, the fixes together, and
every upgrade note at the end, with vLLM's default install and how to keep
your own.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
vLLM was installed by hand and named in each agent's configuration. The
agent now installs it: a Python 3.12 environment built by uv, which is
itself a GitHub release checked against its checksum, from PyPI resolved as
it stood a day after that vLLM was published and installed with
--require-hashes. The resolved list is kept in the environment. The
environment is built relocatable under a scratch name and renamed into place
once it runs, like an archive.
The default is 0.30.0, whose flags were checked against the ones llmgw
builds. It is built for CUDA 13, so it needs driver 580 and a Turing GPU or
newer, and 25 GB free while it installs; a node lacking one says which, and a
node with no GPU skips it without being shown as a fault. gcc comes with it
because Triton compiles its launcher at the first model load. SGLang
installs the same way when the control plane names a version. llmgw doctor
reports whether vLLM can be installed on the node.
Checked by installing 0.30.0 this way on a test node: 7.7 GB, torch 2.13 for
CUDA 13.0, importing cleanly; the node has no GPU, so vLLM was not started.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The changelog's unreleased section had stopped at refusing unloadable
weights; it now covers the rest: telling independent fabrics apart,
their subnet managers and maps, NVLink on every build and across nodes,
the multi-node launch fixes and vLLM's new default, doctor, node load,
editors and the Responses API, the chat and mirror pages, a person's own
use, the admin pages, the new metrics, and how to upgrade.
docs/fabrics.md is new, for a site with InfiniBand or NVLink: what
llmgw does with them, what each node and fabric needs first, declaring
fabrics, checking a node with doctor, what the pages and metrics show
and which to alert on, what an engine is given, and where to look when
a replica spanning nodes will not run. It says plainly that none of it
has yet run on such hardware.
install.md, node-onboarding.md, onboarding.md, the README and the
example agent configuration no longer say the portable binary cannot
see NVLink or that a fabric's name cannot be checked, and describe the
account page and connecting an editor.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
An empty launch_mode meant ray: a Ray head and joins on every node, a
dependency to install, and a path never checked against a real cluster.
It now means mp - every node runs vllm serve with its rank and the
leader's address, the workers headless - which is how vLLM documents a
multi-node launch today and needs nothing but vLLM. ray is still there
for a vLLM too old for mp's flags. The example agent configuration,
doctor and the reference say so.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A GB200 NVL72 rack or an NVLink Switch system is a scale-up island: its
GPUs reach each other over NVLink whatever node they are in. Each GPU
now reports its fabric from nvidia-smi -q - state, status, ClusterUUID,
CliqueId, bandwidth - at registration and once a minute after, since a
fabric manager restarting drops every card out at once; and each node
reports nvidia-imex and its channels, without which the domain's GPUs
cannot share memory across nodes. A single machine's NVSwitch, which
reports a cluster of zeros, is no domain.
A replica spanning nodes is placed inside one domain first, on nodes
whose every card is joined and whose IMEX is up, and its shards are
told NCCL_MNNVL_ENABLE=1; InfiniBand is the fallback.
/admin/nvlink draws each domain as a rack - the NVLink Switch band on
top, light running down a backplane, trays of GPU chips that glow when
joined, pulse red when not, turn amber on degraded bandwidth - and
lists what keeps a tray out. A node's page shows its GPU-by-GPU NVLink
matrix, each card's NUMA node and nearest adapter, and its domain and
IMEX. doctor checks joining, bandwidth, IMEX and its channel; metrics
llmgw_gpu_nvlink_joined and llmgw_imex_up; /api/v1/nvlink.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The control plane asks one node on each physical fabric to run
ibnetdiscover every five minutes and parses the text itself, so a
format the parser has not met is a control plane upgrade, not one on
every node. From the map it works out the switch tiers (leaf, spine,
core, by distance from the adapters), which adapter is which node's,
which cables trained below the rate the rest of their kind run at, and
whether the rails line up: every node's Nth adapter on its own leaf.
A page per fabric (/admin/fabrics) draws it: switches in their tiers,
adapters fanned out under their leaves, cables coloured by rate and
bundled, degraded ones marching red with a marker, and the cluster's
own adapters live - down ports glowing red, and particles running each
cable as fast as its adapter is sending and receiving, from the
counters. It zooms, pans, fades what a hovered switch or adapter does
not touch, opens a panel of detail on a click, colours by rail, finds a
node, and refreshes every fifteen seconds. The data is also at
/api/v1/fabrics/{id}/topology.
Placement reads the map: a replica spanning nodes takes nodes of one
leaf together when it can, and nodes whose cable trained short last.
Static assets are named by their content, as the stylesheet already
was.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A fabric's identity was its master subnet manager, which changes on a
failover: for the minute its ports took to agree, one fabric read as
two, and a name covering it as two separate fabrics. Each agent now
also lists every subnet manager on a fabric (saquery SMIR, through one
port per master, once a minute); managers listed together are one
fabric, named by the lowest GUID among them, so the identity survives
the master changing.
The same list says what a fabric can survive. The cluster page's new
subnet manager table, /api/v1/fabrics, doctor and metrics
(llmgw_fabric_master_sm, llmgw_fabric_subnet_managers,
llmgw_fabric_problems) show each fabric's master, priority and
standbys, and say when a fabric has no standby, its ports disagree on
the master, ports are up with no subnet manager (INIT), or the master
changed in the last hour. Every change of master a port reports is
kept, and a fabric's last day of them is listed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A fabric was what agent.yaml called it. With several independent
InfiniBand fabrics at a site, two given one name would have had a
replica spread across both, starting and then hanging on its first
collective. Each active InfiniBand port now reports the master subnet
manager it sees (sminfo, asked once a minute), which every port on one
fabric shares and ports on separate fabrics cannot; a RoCE port reports
the IP network of its RoCE v2 address. Ports also carry their node and
port GUIDs.
Placement divides a declared fabric by that physical identity and forms
a replica on one part only; a node whose adapters for one name are on
two fabrics is refused, and a node that cannot say is kept apart from
those that can. /api/v1/fabrics and the cluster page list each physical
fabric with its subnet manager, and say when one name covers two
fabrics, two names one fabric, an adapter is up but undeclared, or a
node cannot be checked. doctor reports each port's subnet manager, and
an agent on a node with adapters installs infiniband-diags when sminfo
is missing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
For machines nobody here can log into. It reads the GPUs and their
nvidia-smi topology, NVSwitch and the fabric manager, every InfiniBand
and RoCE port with its counters and RoCE v2 GID, the RDMA and
GPUDirect kernel modules, the agent's declared fabrics against the
adapters, the management interface NCCL will bootstrap over, the
agent unit's memlock limit and the engines installed - and says what
is wrong and how to fix it, most serious first, with the NCCL
environment a shard on each fabric would be given. --json writes every
fact it concluded from, to send back. It exits non-zero when something
fails.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The agent's defaults said eth0 before normalize looked for the interface
holding the management address, so it never looked: a node on ens3 or
bond0 had NCCL and Gloo bootstrap over an interface it does not have. It
is now found, with eth0 only as the last resort.
The agent unit sets LimitMEMLOCK=infinity. RDMA pins what it registers,
and under systemd's 8 MB default an engine without the capability that
lets root ignore the limit fails its first collective over InfiniBand.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
vLLM's mp launch gave workers no rank and the leader's address as their
own VLLM_HOST_IP; every node now runs serve with --nnodes, --node-rank,
--master-addr and --master-port, and the workers --headless, as vLLM
documents it.
NCCL_SOCKET_IFNAME and GLOO_SOCKET_IFNAME were the control plane's one
interface name for every node; the agent already worked out its own -
the one holding its management address - and now uses it.
On RoCE, NCCL's default GID index is a v1 link-local entry on most hosts,
which does not route. The agent finds the RoCE v2 entry holding an IPv4
address and passes it as NCCL_IB_GID_INDEX; InfiniBand gets none.
A worker whose only process needs the leader - a Ray join - started
without waiting for it, since the wait was honoured for sidecars alone;
it found no head, exited and failed the replica. It now waits.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A port's state was read once, at registration: one that went down later
left its node on the fabric, offered multi-node work that would hang on
its first collective, until somebody restarted the agent. The agent now
re-reads every IB and RoCE port on each heartbeat - state, physical
state, rate and the error and data counters - and when the fabrics it
can carry traffic on change, says so once; the control plane replaces
the node's fabrics, which is what placement reads.
The ports are exported as llmgw_ib_port_active (with state and
phys_state, so an unplugged cable reads differently from a missing
subnet manager), llmgw_ib_port_rate_gbps and llmgw_ib_port_counter_total,
and a node's page lists them with the fabric each carries and any error
counter that is not zero.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The release binary is built without cgo, so without NVML, and NVML was
the only source of NVLink peers: on every NVLink machine the portable
agent reported none, and tensor-parallel groups were chosen by GPU index.
Discovery now reads `nvidia-smi topo -m` after either path, for the
NVLink peers (kept from NVML where it gave them), each card's NUMA node,
and how far each network adapter is from it - PIX, PXB, PHB, NODE or
SYS - which travels to the control plane as nic_paths for placement to
use. Both the NICn-with-legend layout of newer drivers and the
adapter-named columns of older ones are read.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The nodes are CPU machines, and nothing measured how busy one was: the
heartbeat carried GPU memory and disk, and llmgw_node_memory_bytes is the
total. The agent now reads /proc between heartbeats - CPU across all
cores, load averages, memory used and available, and each engine's
process group's cores and resident memory - and sends it with the
heartbeat. Nothing new runs on the nodes and Prometheus needs no new
target: the control plane exports it with the rest of the fleet, as
llmgw_node_cpu_utilization_percent, llmgw_node_cpus, llmgw_node_load,
llmgw_node_memory_used_bytes, llmgw_node_memory_available_bytes,
llmgw_shard_cpu_cores and llmgw_shard_memory_bytes. A measurement more
than a minute old is left out rather than repeated.
The cluster page's node table shows CPU and RAM as bars, and each node
links to a page of its own: current CPU, RAM, load and disk, the engines
on it with their cores and memory, and an hour of CPU, RAM, load,
per-model cores and memory and queue depth from Prometheus. It refreshes
in place.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Installs PostgreSQL with the machine's own package manager when it has
none (initdb with password auth on the RHEL family, whose default is
ident), creates the llmgw role and database with a generated password
kept in /etc/llmgw/secrets/store-dsn, and checks the address connects.
On a machine already on SQLite it stops the gateway, copies the store
so accounts and keys survive, points auth.store at the new address and
starts it again. A move that fails starts the gateway on SQLite again.
server.yaml is edited as text so its comments survive, and kept beside
it. A PostgreSQL init did not install is not resized: it may serve
something else. It refuses to move one PostgreSQL store into another.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Seeing what a node did meant ssh through a jump host, to a machine whose
address nobody remembers, to read a journal only root may open. When an
engine install failed on a new node today, the reason was one line — and it
was four steps away from the page that said the install had failed.
Each node's row on the cluster page now links to its logs: the agent's own,
and every engine running there, chosen from the list the node itself sends.
The page can follow, refreshing every five seconds, and is on both the admin
listener and /admin. `llmgw ctl logs NODE [--source SHARD] [-n N]` reads the
same.
They travel over the stream the agent already holds, so they need nothing
the control plane does not already have: a request goes down, the lines come
back, and a reply that does not come in ten seconds is an agent too old to
answer. The agent keeps its last 2000 lines in memory as well as writing them
wherever it did before; the engines' last few hundred lines were already kept
and sent only when one crashed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Found by building a node from nothing. Its agent tried to install libgomp1
while cloud-init and unattended-upgrades were running apt, and failed with
"Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/": DPkg::Lock::Timeout covers
dpkg's lock, not the one `apt-get update` takes on its lists. The node was
correctly kept out of placement and said why, and then sat idle for the ten
minutes until the next pass.
A package command that fails only on a held lock is now retried for up to
ten minutes, reported as "waiting for another apt-get to finish" rather than
as a failure. A pass that does fail is retried after a minute, backing off to
ten.
The weights directory is created when the agent starts rather than by the
first download, so a new node reports its disk from its first heartbeat.
Onboarding takes several control plane addresses, comma separated, so a new
node gets the same failover list as the rest.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The llama.cpp build is published from Ubuntu but is not Ubuntu's in any way
that matters: it needs glibc 2.34 and GCC 12's libstdc++, which Debian 12
and RHEL 10 have and RHEL 9 does not. Refusing every system not called
"ubuntu" turned away the first two for their name. The build is now tried
everywhere, and ldd decides.
What ldd says is made readable. "/lib64/libstdc++.so.6: version
`GLIBCXX_3.4.30' not found" is a system too old for the build, and is
reported as "libstdc++.so.6 is too old (needs GLIBCXX_3.4.30)", once —
rather than as a missing library that is plainly installed.
Packages are named per family — libgomp1 for Debian's, libgomp for Red
Hat's — and installed with whichever of apt-get, dnf, yum or zypper the
machine has, decided from ID_LIKE rather than a list of distribution names.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A node ran whatever llama-server somebody had once unpacked on it. Onboarding
checked an engine only when told its path, installed none, and a node with
nothing on it registered as ready. The one time that went wrong it went wrong
invisibly: the binary was there, executable, and could not start for want of
libgomp1, while the node reported healthy.
The control plane now says which engines every node has, at which version —
`engines:` in server.yaml, defaulting to the llama.cpp build this release was
checked against — and each agent converges on it. What only the node can
know, the node works out: the build for its processor and driver (CUDA with
its runtime when an NVIDIA driver is loaded, CPU otherwise), the OS packages
that build needs from its own package sources, and whether the result runs.
Every archive is checked against the sha256 GitHub publishes for it and
unpacked refusing any path or link that leaves the install directory. ldd
names a missing library outright; running `--version` proves the rest. Only
then is a directory marked installed, and it is checked again every ten
minutes, because an unrelated upgrade can remove a library.
An engine is reported only once installed and seen to run, or when the
agent's configuration names it on purpose — never because something happened
to be on PATH. The agent now says when it has probed, so an empty list means
"has none" rather than "too old to say": a node rebuilt from nothing is no
longer a candidate for every model at the moment it can run none of them.
Placement's refusal carries the node's own words, "installing: downloading
llama-b10991-bin-ubuntu-x64.tar.gz (16 MB)", and so do `ctl nodes` and the
cluster page, along with a warning for a CPU without AVX2 — the VM CPU type
that makes everything five times slower and nothing look wrong.
Agents also report their OS, architecture, vector extensions and NVIDIA
driver. Onboarding installs llmgw itself from the CI release for the node's
architecture, checked against the release's checksums, rather than copying
whatever binary the operator's machine had.
vLLM and SGLang are not installed yet: they are Python environments of
several gigabytes, not an archive, and still have to be named in the agent's
configuration.
Also fixes a race on the weights fingerprint, which two heartbeat loops touch
during a failover.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every agent file on the cluster named its own node, its own address, the
path to llama-server and two weight directories — different on every node,
kept true by hand, and not true: node05 carried "ram: 32g" beside a measured
31 GB, looked for weights in an empty directory while fetching them into
another, and the other four never looked in theirs at all, so four nodes
reported no disk. Growing a node's RAM would have gone unnoticed, because
memory was read once, at registration.
The agent now finds these out. Its id is the hostname, which is also the
certificate's common name. Its address is the one on the route to the
control plane, which the kernel picks for a UDP dial without sending
anything. llama-server is looked for on PATH and then where release archives
are unpacked. A missing nvidia-smi is a node without NVIDIA cards rather
than a failed discovery — which also cut discovery short before InfiniBand
on every CPU node not told to skip GPUs. Fetched weights land in
/var/lib/llmgw-weights by default, and wherever they land is always looked
in.
Memory is read on every heartbeat, and installed engines are probed again
each minute and sent when they change, so a VM given more RAM or a node
given vLLM becomes a candidate without anyone restarting its agent. The
control plane logs both changes, since "the node now qualifies" is the
answer to why a model placed an hour after it was asked for.
What is written still wins. The agent file shrinks to the control plane's
addresses and the TLS files, the same on every node; onboarding writes only
the overrides it was given. What cannot be found stays configuration: which
fabric an adapter is on, because OpenSM's default prefix is the same on all
of them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The stale-profile flag could not fire where it matters. The control plane
keeps no record of a running replica across its own restart — it rebuilds
them from what the agents report — and adoption left the fingerprint empty,
so every replica read as unknown afterwards. That is precisely the moment
the catalog is most likely to have been edited: change the configuration,
restart the server, and nothing would ever say the fleet disagrees with it.
The fingerprint now travels with StartShard, the agent keeps it beside the
pool and fabric it already echoes back, and adoption takes the replica's
version from the agent rather than from the catalog it is about to be
compared against. An agent too old to report it sends nothing, which still
reads as unknown rather than as matching.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The mirror would happily hold a four-shard model that nothing could serve. A
catalog entry names one source, the agent fetched one URL, and so a version of
several files had no way to be described — which is every safetensors model,
and every GGUF too large to ship whole.
A source ending in a slash names a version rather than a file. The agent fetches
every file in it into one directory and hands the engine the directory: vLLM
reads the shards and the config out of the folder, and llama.cpp is given the
first part and finds the rest beside it.
The trailing slash is the whole signal. A flag beside the source would be a
second place for the two to disagree, and a URL already distinguishes a
directory from a file everywhere else.
The mirror answers a version with a manifest instead of a file listing. A plain
file server gives HTML there, and something that has to know what a version
consists of would be left parsing it. It is on the byte listener, not the
management API: fetching weights is the one thing every node does, and making
it depend on the administrative port would undo the split that keeps that port
closeable.
Built from the directory rather than a file written beside it. A manifest on
disk is a second record of what is there, and the two disagree the first time
somebody copies a file in by hand — which the mirror explicitly allows.
The whole set or nothing. A directory with three of four shards loads as a
broken model rather than failing to load, so a completion marker is written
last and an interrupted fetch starts the missing files again rather than being
found and served. Files already there at the right size are not fetched twice.
Progress is reported under the version's address, not each file's: the shards
waiting on it asked for the version, and progress under a file's own URL
reaches nobody.
A filename from the manifest is refused if it contains a separator. The mirror
is a place an operator copies files into by hand, so what it reports is not
automatically safe to join onto a path.
An HTML listing where a manifest was expected says so. "invalid character '<'"
sends somebody looking at the wrong thing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A node's registry holds an adapter for every engine whether or not its binary
exists, the agent never said which were installed, and placement carried an
Engine field it had never once read. So a vLLM replica was as happily placed on
a node with no vLLM: the node registered healthy, the shard failed minutes
later with "executable file not found" in the engine's own words, and the
reconciler tried again.
That is how fifteen gigabytes of safetensors reached this cluster's mirror
before anybody noticed it had no card and no vLLM to run them with.
Agents now probe what is installed and report it — the protocol has carried
engine_versions since it was written and nothing ever filled it in. Placement
filters on the key set, `ctl nodes` has a column, and the mirror page's serve
warning is a fact instead of a guess about cards, which would have waved
through a fleet of eight-GPU nodes that never had vLLM.
Probing resolves binaries and runs none of them. The first version asked each
engine for --version, which is fine for an engine and not fine for the wrapper
scripts people put in front of one: a script that shifts past flags it does not
recognise and then execs the server will start an inference server, at agent
startup, on every node. The agent's own test suite installs exactly such a
script and caught it. So presence is a path lookup, and the version is left to
`ctl engine-check`, which is run by somebody who meant to run the engine.
SGLang is the exception and has to execute, because a module has no path to
look up — but the command is llmgw's own one-line import rather than the
engine's launcher. Its exit code is the answer: python3 is on almost every
machine, and treating a failed import as "installed" reported SGLang on every
node in a fleet that had none, which is the failure being fixed, inverted.
Probed once, not per reconnect, and bounded by the context that registration
waits on: an agent that cannot reach the control plane is worse than one
reporting an incomplete list.
A node that reports no engines at all is not excluded anywhere — by placement,
or by the page. That is what every agent older than this reports, and emptying
a fleet on a control plane upgrade is a worse failure than the one being fixed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The test started a sidecar and an engine, each a shell appending its name to a
file, and demanded the sidecar's line come first. The supervisor spawns the
sidecar first, but spawning is not sequencing: without WaitForLeaderPort
nothing holds the engine back, so two shells race and the scheduler picks the
winner. It failed under full-suite load, and lately on its own.
The wait that is a real guarantee already has its own test, so the fix is to
check what this one is actually for — that both processes run under one shard,
that the shard's pid is the engine's rather than the sidecar's, and that their
output is distinguishable in a single log tail. Renamed to say so.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
