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Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on CUDA: routed experts and its MTP layer drafting chains (on #836) - #856

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What this changes

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (model_type: qwen3_5_moe) serves on the native CUDA engine, with its own MTP layer drafting chains. Closes the 4-bit gate of #803. It stacks on #836, whose Qwen3.5 CUDA engine it extends: the first 24 commits here are that pull request's, and the four of this one are the last four.

  • cuda: the affine-4 experts' SwiGLU pair form, and softmax top-k routing with a shared expert: the grouped affine-4 expert kernel ran only Nemotron's relu² up; its SwiGLU epilogue over two accumulators is now instantiated for decode and prompt rows (gate and up interleaved per group), and the pack kernel takes a table stride and index. cuda/moe.zig and moe.cu are the routing the frozen tensorfold/cuda/moe.py did: fp32 logits over the experts and the shared expert's gate row, each row's top-k by logit with ties to the lower id, weights exp(l - l_top) over the k rounded to bf16, the shared expert as a slot weighted by bf16(sigmoid(bf16(gate))), the slots' weighted sum rounded once to bf16. tf-cuda-test moe checks each against a host reference.
  • qwen3_5: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B's routed experts on the CUDA engine: the geometry reads the expert counts, the loader dequantizes the 8-bit router rows to bf16 and packs each layer's 256 experts plus the shared one as a pair table and a down table, and a layer's MLP is a union of the dense projections and the routed set. The forward routes, plans, runs the pair and down kernels and combines into the residual, inside the captured graphs as before. Prompt chunks past a window's rows take the prefill kernels; shorter ones the decode form, so a short chunk keeps one-row steps' bits. tf-qwen35-cuda gains a probe mode that prints one layer's picks, weights and logits.
  • qwen3_5: the MTP layer drafts chains for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on CUDA: --drafter <the checkpoint's own directory> loads mtp-4bit.safetensors beside the weights, one attention-plus-experts layer over [norm(embedding of the next token) | norm(the row's final normed state)] with the target's head for its draft, as the frozen engine's cuda/mtp.py ran it. The drafter taps the target's last layer and applies the final norm itself; each stream keeps the layer's keys and values over its whole window in a ring, absorbs the kept rows with the token after each (the newest row's output is the first draft) and holds a chain of up to TF_MTP_DRAFTS (default 3) more. Drafts only propose; the target's windows verify them. The 3-bit expert form of qwen3_5_moe on native CUDA with 3-bit routed experts (a 35B-A3B on a 24 GB card): where it lives, and its gate #803 is not in this.
  • docs: the Windows page, the README's model table and the Qwen3.6 recipe.

The 2B's and the 27B's bits are unchanged (receipt below).

Receipt

  • Environment: this branch on main 2984ea0 (through Windows: the native CUDA server, and Qwen3.5-2B and Qwen3.8-27B on CUDA #836), Zig 0.17.0, CUDA 13.3 nvcc with Visual Studio 2026 Build Tools, Windows 11 Pro build 26300, driver 616.56, RTX 4090 (24 GB, sm_89, WDDM). Checkpoint TensorFold/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit-MTP at f84b054c (MLX affine 4-bit, groups of 64, routers 8-bit, its MTP layer). Mac: M5 Ultra, macOS 27, for the host tests and the Metal build.

  • Exactness:

    • tools/bench_concurrent.py --levels 1,2 --tokens 128 --reps 2 --alone --serial served with --parallel 2 --context 8192 --drafter <the checkpoint>: every drafted reply's token_sha equal to its lone run and to its "draft": false run, 36 of 36 checks, 0 unequal, 0 failed. The same at --levels 1,4 with --parallel 4 --context 4096: 60 of 60.
    • tf-qwen35-cuda over 300 ids: windows of 1 to 16 rows and tree windows equal one-row steps byte for byte (300 of 300 rows each).
    • Against an fp32 PyTorch reference (dequantized weights, the same routing rule), one-row steps over 40 ids agree at KL mean 0.015, max 0.15, the same argmax in 35 of 40. That is the model's own rounding sensitivity: two such references that differ only by rounding the normed rows to bf16 before routing differ by KL mean 0.016 from each other (36 of 40), while the dense 2B on this engine agrees with its reference at 0.0005 and the 27B at 0.0001. The MTP drafts carry no bits into replies.
    • The 2B's one-row steps over the branch's 36-id reference: 36 of 36 rows byte-equal to before. The 27B with its DFlash2 drafter, the same bench at --levels 1,2: 36 of 36 checks equal.
  • Decode speed, tools/bench_openai.py --tokens 128 --reps 3, median tok/s, one stream (no "before" exists: the native engine did not serve this model):

    serve code, T=1.0 chat, T=1.0 code, greedy chat, greedy aggregate
    --parallel 2 --context 8192, plain (no --drafter) 96 95 101 98 195 at 2 streams
    --parallel 2 --context 8192, MTP drafts 223 139 240 206 169 to 228 at 2 streams
    --parallel 4 --context 4096, MTP drafts 249 197 271 230 388 to 689 at 4 streams

    A chained draft costs 0.5 ms, a hold 1.2 ms and an absorb 0.7 ms; chains of three keep about three of four drafts on the chat prompt (accepted=77/106 over 50 rounds of 128 tokens). The acceptance, so the drafted speed, varies between runs on the sampled prompts.

  • Prompt speed: tools/bench_cache.py --require-cold (its 2,571-token fixture), the cold first request's ttft_s, qualified: 0.72 s with the drafter at either window (the 27B on the same card: 3.05 s). No "before" exists.

  • Tests run: zig build test on Windows: 734 tests, 720 passed, 14 skipped, 0 failed (one new, the MoE geometry). tf-cuda-test moe (router and combine byte-equal to the host, picks equal with weights within a bf16 step, the pair experts within 1e-6 of fp64), glue (1,242 of 1,242), sample, quant-ref and smoke: all pass. On the M5 Ultra: zig build test 0 failed, zig build tensorfold builds, test-golden 309 of 319 equal with 0 unexpected. tools/zig/lean_check.py: 528 problems on this branch and on main, none added. zig fmt --check: clean. The fork's workflows (no-GPU on ubuntu and windows, fmt, app) on this tip: see the checks.

  • Not run, and why: a GB10, Ampere or Blackwell card (sm_89 only here, so the 3090 receipts qwen3_5_moe on native CUDA with 3-bit routed experts (a 35B-A3B on a 24 GB card): where it lives, and its gate #803 asked for are the author's to add). Metal serving of the model (the Metal native binary has no qwen3_5_moe family; this adds none). Tree drafts from the MTP layer (chains only, as the frozen engine). TF_MTP_DRAFTS above 3 was not measured.

Checklist

  • Every token still goes through the lane rounds. No serial path, and nothing that needs drafts off. (The routed experts run inside the lane backend's windows; the MTP drafter proposes through the Drafter contract.)
  • Drafted output equals "draft": false, a resumed prompt equals a fresh one, and concurrent equals solo. (Receipt above; the engine has no prompt cache, so resumed equals fresh by construction.)
  • No precision traded for speed. (The experts' SwiGLU keeps the grouped kernel's bf16 rounding points; the routing is the frozen engine's rule in fp32.)
  • Prompt processing is no slower than the last release. (No shared prompt path changes; this model had no native release.)
  • The description says which platforms I ran, Metal M1 to M5 and CUDA, and which I could not. (RTX 4090 on Windows; M5 Ultra for host tests and the Metal build; not GB10, Ampere, Blackwell, M1 to M4.)
  • New tests fail before the change, pass after it, and skip cleanly without their dependency. (tf-cuda-test moe needs a GPU; the geometry test runs everywhere.)
  • Comments and docstrings are one line. No measurements or history in the source.
  • No personal data, machine names, internal hosts or local paths. No AI attribution lines.

- zig/src/platform: `sys`, imported by every module (zig/build/sys.zig wires
  it). On POSIX it is std.c, std.posix and std.DynLib unchanged; on Windows
  win_c.zig gives libc's surface over the UCRT and Win32 (integer
  descriptors, directory descriptors, readdir, pread/pwrite, high-resolution
  sleep, monotonic clock, /tmp and /proc/self/exe mapped), win_posix.zig the
  server's sockets over Winsock, console events as SIGINT/SIGTERM, and
  LoadLibraryW for DynLib.
- std.c and std.DynLib calls go through `platform` (mechanical).
- build.zig routes Windows targets to the CUDA build.
- Server: socket closes and writes are explicit, the key file's mode check
  is skipped on NTFS (ACLs), descriptor limits are a no-op.
- shard_edit: the shard's map is released before the rename, since Windows
  refuses to replace a mapped file.
- Tests that need symlink privilege or mode bits skip on Windows.

zig build test-cuda-host passes on x86_64-windows.
- Kernel fatbins build with nvcc and cl.exe: MSVC's conforming
  preprocessor is passed on Windows hosts (CUDA 13's headers need it),
  and explicit kernel instantiations carry the __restrict__ qualifiers
  their templates have (MSVC counts them in the function type; the
  generated code is unchanged).
- Nemotron's checkpoint source keeps io_uring to Linux; elsewhere its
  existing thread reads run.
- pull_exlr8 raises no descriptor limit on Windows.
- modelopt test: the lane's slice partials are allocated. GPUs without
  clusters (before sm_90) reduce split K through them; the test passed
  none, so it wrote through a null pointer on Ampere and Ada.

zig build native and install build with -Dnvcc=... -Dsm=89, and
tf-cuda-test's synthetic suites pass on an RTX 4090.
- pull: where Windows refuses the snapshot's symlink, the snapshot path
  becomes a hard link to its blob (CreateHardLinkW through `sys.c.link`):
  no extra space, and learning already refuses linked shards. Link
  failures are logged with their reason.
- HOME falls back to USERPROFILE (Windows sets no HOME) for the hub cache
  and every libc getenv("HOME").
- Tests read optional fixture variables through `platform.getenv`;
  std.process.Environ.getPosix does not build on Windows.
- The learned-state symlink tests skip on Windows (symlinks need
  privilege); `sys.c.symlink` asks for an unprivileged one.

zig build test passes on x86_64-windows.
- docs/WINDOWS.md: requirements, build, run, how the port works and how it
  differs from Linux; the README points to it.
- -Dstrip reaches tensorfold-native before its install step is made, so
  the step no longer expects a .pdb the stripped build does not write.
- zig fmt on the platform files.
8080 and 8000 are taken by too many other servers; serve listens on 8888
unless --port says otherwise, and the docs and bench scripts follow.
The MLX affine 4-bit checkpoint on the native CUDA server, beside Nemotron:
qwen35.cu holds the Metal engine's glue at its bf16 rounding points (gated
delta rule, causal convolution, gated attention), cuda.qlinear's affine-4
kernels do the projections, sample.cu draws on the device.

Windows of up to 16 rows record each row's recurrence and convolution tail,
so the lane core shares rounds across streams and keeps partial copies; a
window's rows equal one-row steps bit for bit. draw.zig is the host draw
both backends now share.

On an RTX 4090: 210 tok/s for one stream, 1250 tok/s across eight; logits
agree with an fp32 reference at every position of a 36-token check.
…mory

The 2B's CUDA engine now reads its widths from config.json (cuda_geometry.zig):
linear value heads over fewer key heads, more query heads a key/value head,
an untied head, an A_log stored as bf16. The 27B's logits agree with an fp32
reference at every position of a 36-token check, and its windows equal
one-row steps bit for bit; the 2B's output is unchanged.

Two Windows driver costs shaped the rest. Each kernel launch grew with the
process's allocation count (1.2 ms a launch over 1,900 weight buffers), so a
model's weights and scratch now live in one arena (cuda_weights.zig packs
each projection through a reused staging buffer: the 27B loads in 25 s, not
200). And a process's first forwards through a buffer stall for seconds, so
the engine warms every request path at load and the backend keeps a pool of
stream caches that `reserve` allocates and runs a row through once the
server knows its stream count.

On an RTX 4090: the 27B decodes at 37 tok/s in the runner, 31 to 35 tok/s
served, 210 tok/s across eight streams; the 2B stays at 210 and 1,250.
A forward's launches (the embedding to the kept rows' logits) are captured
the first time a shape (rows, windows, recording) is seen and replayed after;
the attention chunk count moves into the per-forward table so a graph stays
valid as caches grow. Prompt chunks stay uncaptured: their GEMMs dwarf the
launches, and each length would be a graph of its own.

A new graph's first run pays the Windows driver's stall (about a second on a
wide model), so `reserve` also captures the shared rounds' shapes, a row of
each of 1 to n streams, at load.

Bit for bit the same logits; on an RTX 4090 the 2B steps in 2.8 ms instead of
5.3 (served: 324 tok/s, 1,560 across eight streams) and the 27B in 23.8 ms
instead of 26.9 (served: 40 tok/s, 243 across eight).
--drafter loads z-lab's DFlash2 draft model behind the lane core's Drafted
wrapper: the target writes each row's residual after the drafter's five
tapped layers into a ring a stream, the drafter folds those rows into a
context of keys and values, and after every verify it drafts a block of
seven tokens past the pending one (the target's own embedding and head at
its ends, a codebook selector tracing one path through each row's best
sixteen). Its projections are quantized to affine-4 on the host at load and
run through the target's kernels; its glue is qwen35_draft.cu.

The Windows driver stalls a buffer's first kernel and a new graph's first
run for seconds, so the drafter pools its contexts and a captured forward
now serves every verify shape: its launches cover a bucket of rows and
every window, and the kernels read the true counts from the device.

On an RTX 4090 the 27B serves 52 to 58 tok/s greedy with drafts against 40
plain, about 100 tok/s on long replies, the same tokens either way; plain
decoding keeps its 24 ms step. The 2B is unchanged.
A verify window's rows may form a tree (each row's parent given): the
convolution taps, the delta rule and attention follow each row's own
branch, and the DFlash2 drafter fills the lane core's planned lanes
(each lane its parent's rank-r choice by the codebook selector), so a
lone stream verifies up to 12 lanes a round and the planner learns
which shapes land.

A verify no longer snapshots every row's state (1.3 GB shared, which
capped the 27B at 8 rows): each stream logs its rows' decay, write and
key, and keep replays the kept path onto the recurrence in one pass
(and moves a tree's kept keys down), so any window width fits. One-row
steps and prompts update in place as before. The lane host times the
target's windows at load, which the depth rule had lacked (it had been
capping chains at 3 drafts).

The runner's new tree mode verifies tree windows with junk branches
against step logits (bit-exact on both models).
What the port serves beyond Nemotron: Qwen3.5-2B and Qwen3.8-27B with
its DFlash2 drafter, the speeds measured on an RTX 4090, the load time
and why, the timing and chain-only switches, and what is not there.
The lean rule (tools/zig/lean_check.py) counts a comment that runs on
to a second line; the Windows port's new files had a hundred such runs.
Each is one line of at most 120 columns now, and the checker reports
the same 539 problems as main.
direct_io opened files with O_DIRECT on Linux alone. On Windows the
same open now asks for FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING (which win_c maps O_DIRECT
to), and the 4 KiB-aligned spans it already reads satisfy the sector
alignment that needs; a file system that refuses it still falls back to
buffered reads. The direct-read test runs on Windows too, checking the
executable's bytes against buffered reads of it.
SIG.IGN is a function pointer made from 1, as std.posix has it. aarch64
requires function pointers to be aligned unless the type says align(1),
so the cross-build for aarch64-windows refused it. With align(1), as
std's own handler type has, tensorfold-native cross-compiles for
aarch64-windows with the GB10 (sm_121) fatbins; no hardware has run it.
The Windows page opens with what the build is, what it is tested on and
that it cross-compiles for aarch64-windows; the README's model table
and the CUDA paragraph say Windows where they said unofficial port.
The no-GPU workflow runs zig build test on windows-latest beside
ubuntu-latest, so the platform layer is built and tested on every pull
request.
Every other module calls libc through `sys`; the drafter's four getenv
calls were the last direct std.c calls in a file the Windows build
compiles.
After a prompt the lane core hands the drafter every prompt row's
features; the CUDA backend refused any request wider than its tap ring
(2,176 rows), so a 27B request with --drafter and a prompt past that
ended with RowsNotHeld, where the same prompt without the drafter ran.
The ring keeps the newest tap_rows rows, which hold the drafter's whole
context window, and absorb already reads only that window of what it is
handed; the backend now refuses only rows not yet written or all gone.

On an RTX 4090 the 27B with its drafter takes a 6,041-token prompt in
7.4 s, and its reply equals the one with "draft": false.
… attention cuts chunks at logical positions

- rowanc held a window's rows as bits of a u32, but prompt chunks run up to
  128 rows: rows from 32 on rotated at the wrong positions and attended the
  wrong keys. A chain row (no parents) now carries its index in its window
  under the top bit; tree windows (at most 16 rows) keep their bits.
- tf_q35_attn_partial cut its 128-key chunks at a key's cache row, so a kept
  tree path whose window crossed a chunk boundary summed in other chunks than
  one-row steps and changed bits. Chunks are now cut at the key's logical
  position (the stream's length plus the ancestors before it).

Checked on an RTX 5090 (Linux, sm_120), tf-qwen35-cuda over 300 ids on
Qwen3.5-2B and Qwen3.8-27B: step bits unchanged, window and tree equal step
byte for byte (tree differed from row 126 on the 2B and 254 on the 27B
before). Prompt mode's last row against step's at 16 to 300 ids: KL at most
0.003 and the same argmax in 20 of 20 (before: 27B at 40 ids KL 2.3 with a
different argmax, at 128 ids KL 1.35).
zig build test-golden and zig build fuzz-cortheon exist on every non-macOS
host since the golden step moved into zig/build/golden.zig, so the golden
check compiles against the platform layer on Windows:

- the platform's posix gains sockaddr.in, timeval, connect and kill for a
  child's handle (TerminateProcess; HUP has no equivalent), setsockopt turns
  a timeval for SO_RCVTIMEO or SO_SNDTIMEO into Winsock's milliseconds, and a
  socket read that times out is WouldBlock, as std.posix reports it.
- the check carries SystemRoot into the spawned server's environment, which
  Winsock needs to start, and drains the server's stdout after the port line
  on every host: the fake server logs each request there, and a full pipe
  (4 KiB on Windows) blocked it after sixteen cases.
- on Windows the check cannot send SIGTERM or SIGHUP, so the sigterm-exit-0
  outcome and the cases after a key rewrite are skipped and printed as such.

On Windows the goldens give 306 of 315 equal with the same nine known
differences as Linux, and the fuzz step passes its eight tests; the no-GPU
workflow's Windows job runs both.
The loader tried only libcublasLt.so.13 and libcublasLt.so, so the
cublaslt suite of tf-cuda-test reported LibraryUnavailable on Windows;
there it opens cublasLt64_13.dll from the toolkit's bin folder.
The platform handed O_APPEND to the C runtime as _O_APPEND, whose write
seeks to the end and then writes, so two threads appending at once could
overwrite each other's bytes: the request log lost lines under concurrent
requests, which the server goldens' request-log case caught on a slow
runner. A descriptor opened with O_APPEND now writes through WriteFile at
the end-of-file offset, which the kernel places whole, as POSIX does; the
file keeps its write access, so ftruncate on such a descriptor still works
(prompt_imprint repairs a torn index that way).

A request_log test appends 200 lines from each of 8 threads and expects
every line whole; it lost lines on Windows before this change.
The lifecycle/request-log outcome said only that the lines differ; it now
gives both logs' line counts and the first line that differs, cut to 100
bytes each, so a mismatch seen on a CI runner can be read from its log.
A checkout with core.autocrlf, as GitHub's Windows runners make, gives the
frozen request log CRLF line endings while the server writes LF, so the
lifecycle/request-log case differed at its first line's end on windows-latest
and nowhere else. Both logs compare with CRLF read as LF; the other goldens
are parsed as JSON and never saw the endings.
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One more commit, bf07cbab: the MTP drafter can draft the lane planner's trees (TF_MTP_TREES=1), each depth's lanes as one pass over the ring and their own ancestor lanes' keys, lane tokens from the logprob rows' ranks. Measured on the 4090 at --parallel 2 --context 8192, median tok/s (code T=1 / chat T=1 / code greedy / chat greedy): chains 248 / 197 / 271 / 235, trees 237 / 195 / 250 / 236; two streams 387 to 450 aggregate with chains, 381 to 439 with trees. Trees draft three times the rows for the same tokens a round (88 of 430 lanes kept against 83 of 132 chained drafts), and the wider verify windows cost what the fewer rounds save, so chains stay the default and trees are opt-in. The same commit takes the drafter's load-time cost of a level as the quickest of sixteen holds: the driver's stalls lasted a dozen on this box, and six gave the planner 3.9 ms where 0.45 is right. Replies still equal "draft": false (the final run's 36 of 36 alone and serial checks), lean and fmt clean, host tests unchanged.

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Quality on this branch, the qwen quality suite (the one the published Spark recipes report) against the server on the RTX 4090, thinking off, MTP drafts on, --parallel 2 --context 8192, with the 27B on the same server code for scale:

check Qwen3.6-35B-A3B + MTP Qwen3.8-27B + DFlash2
drafts (drafted = undrafted) 12/12, 221 vs 148 tok/s 12/12, 122 vs 39 tok/s
concurrent (2 streams = alone) 12/12 12/12
streaming, stop, copy, max-tokens all pass all pass
multiturn 7/8 facts 7/8 facts
thinking 10/10 10/10
tools 52/60 59/60
json 30/30 30/30
IFEval loose / strict 131 / 125 of 150 129 / 121 of 150
GSM8K 239/250 240/250
MMLU, 57 subjects x 6 278/342 267/342
repetition 8/8 8/8

The MoE's eight tool misses are replies with no call at all (for example "What is 48 * 17 + 3?" answered in prose); the 27B through the same parser makes 59 of 60, so that is the model's choice, not the server's. The suite's long-context documents exceed an 8k window, so that check did not run.

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The suite's long-context check, which needs more than an 8k window, at --context 32768 --parallel 1:

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B + MTP Qwen3.8-27B + DFlash2
needles at 7k, depths 0.1 / 0.5 / 0.9 3/3 3/3
needles at 28.5k, depths 0.1 / 0.5 / 0.9 3/3 3/3
ten spread facts recalled together at 28.6k 10/10 10/10
prefill at 28.5k 2,172 tok/s 652 tok/s

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Two more measurements, from the recipe harness (github.com/BobClawblaw/recipe-harness, its quick plan) against the 4090, the 27B on the same server for scale:

Long context at a 64k window, one stream, as far as the suite's ladder fits beside the weights on 24 GB (no fp8 KV cache on this branch, so 128k does not fit either model):

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B + MTP Qwen3.8-27B + DFlash2
needles at 7k, 28k and 57k, three depths each 9/9 9/9
ten spread facts at 28k and at 57k 10/10, 10/10 10/10, 10/10
prefill at 57k 1,592 tok/s 503 tok/s

The harness's quick plan, --parallel 2 --context 8192, one stream, greedy, ruler phases prose / code / structured / list:

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B + MTP Qwen3.8-27B + DFlash2
ruler fresh, tok/s 203 / 246 / 247 / 282 112 / 149 / 123 / 128
ruler after the serving checks 203 / 246 / 246 / 282 112 / 149 / 123 / 128
time to first token, short prompts 0.05 s 0.16 s
sampling: seeded replies equal on repeat and undrafted 9/9 9/9
turns: resumed == again == cold (5.6k-token prompt) yes, 1.78 s yes, 6.79 s
suite: drafts, concurrent, streaming, stop, copy, max-tokens all exact all exact
soak: 3 chats x 20 turns resuming 5-6k-token states beside a decoding stream 60/60 equal to alone 60/60 equal to alone

No turn resumed a kept state in either column (cached 0): the Qwen CUDA family has no prompt cache on this branch, so the harness marks soak as not exercised rather than mismatched. The MoE's 5.6k-token turn costs 1.8 s cold against the 27B's 6.8 s.

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Ran this on Linux with an RTX 5090 (sm_120). Until now it had only run on the 4090 (sm_89).

Setup: branch head bf07cbab as pushed (2 commits behind main, not merged), built with -Dsm=120. Ubuntu, kernel 7.0, driver 615.71.09, CUDA 13.3, Zig 0.17.0. Checkpoint TensorFold/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit-MTP. The "base" build is #836's head, 153d6b43.

tf-cuda-test: moe, smoke, glue (1,242 of 1,242), sample (2,880 of 2,880) and quant-ref all pass.

tf-qwen35-cuda, 300 README ids:

  • 35B-A3B: window and tree logits are byte-equal to one-row steps. Prompt mode's last row differs from the last step row. Every 4-bit model here behaves the same way, including the 2B on the base build (4-bit prompt GEMM), so I don't think this PR causes it.
  • Qwen3.5-2B and Qwen3.8-27B (4-bit): all four modes byte-equal to the base build.

Served, bench_concurrent --tokens 128 --reps 2 --alone --serial:

Serve Levels Checks equal Unequal / failed
--parallel 2 --context 8192 --drafter <ckpt> 1,2 36 / 36 0 / 0
--parallel 4 --context 4096 --drafter <ckpt> 1,4 60 / 60 0 / 0
27B + DFlash2, --parallel 2 --context 8192 1,2 36 / 36 0 / 0

One-stream decode, bench_openai --tokens 128 --reps 3, median tok/s:

Serve code greedy chat greedy code T=1 chat T=1
plain 163 162 163 160
MTP, --parallel 2 329 254 341 249
MTP, --parallel 4 329 254 337 249

With MTP at --parallel 4, four streams reached 861 (code) and 658 (chat) tok/s greedy, and 680 and 553 sampled. Sampled runs vary with draft acceptance; one T=1 rep was about 300 tok/s.

Long context: --parallel 1 --drafter <ckpt>. One chat prompt fills the window, made of the repo's docs and Zig sources, with a random 10-character code placed 5% in. The question at the end asks for the code. Greedy, 64 tokens, run drafted and then with "draft": false.

Context Prompt tokens Code retrieved Drafted = plain (token_sha) Time to first token GPU memory after load
65,536 64,525 yes, both yes 36.9 s 21.6 GB
131,072 130,060 yes, both yes 125.7 s 23.0 GB
262,144 261,134 yes, both yes 465 s 25.8 GB

The time to first token covers the whole prompt pass, so the 256K row is about 560 tok/s of prefill. Decode speed over 64-token replies at these lengths was too noisy to report.

Not run: the fp32 PyTorch reference comparison (no KL figure from this card), MTP tree drafts (TF_MTP_TREES=1), TF_MTP_DRAFTS other than the default, GB10, Ampere. These speeds come from one card and aren't a comparison against the 4090's.

@BobClawblaw

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Test run on a GB10 (sm_121, aarch64 Linux)

Head bf07cbab, checkpoint TensorFold/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit-MTP at f84b054c.

Setup. One DGX Spark: NVIDIA GB10 (sm_121, aarch64, 128 GB unified memory), Ubuntu kernel 7.0.0-1019-nvidia, driver 580.178.04, nvcc 13.3, Zig 0.17.0. Built with -Dsm=121 -Doptimize=ReleaseFast.

  • Build, native and zig build test: clean, 48/48 steps, 0 failures.
  • tf-cuda-test: moe passes, with 12 pairs over 6 SwiGLU experts within 6.9e-7 of the fp64 reference. smoke and glue (1,242 of 1,242) pass.
  • tf-qwen35-cuda over 300 ids: window and tree equal step byte for byte. step takes 13.6 ms a token.
  • Served with --context 8192 --parallel 2 --drafter <the checkpoint>:
    • The model takes 19.10 GiB on the device.
    • bench_concurrent --alone --serial at 1 and 4 streams: 40 of 40 equal alone, 20 of 20 equal undrafted, nothing failed.
MTP chains, one stream (bench_openai, median tok/s) code chat
T=1 90 65
greedy 92 67
  • Two streams together: 109 to 153 tok/s aggregate.
  • Cold prompt (bench_cache --require-cold): 1.36 s.

@ashhart

ashhart commented Oct 15, 2026

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Hello @BobClawblaw,

Thank you for drafting the planner's trees on the MTP path. Two index errors in that path have to change before it lands.

Rows packed at one depth do not share a RoPE position. The kernel sets the position to the base plus the row (qwen36_mtp.cu:45). holdTree launches a depth at the pending position plus that depth (cuda_mtp.zig:436) and packs every internal lane at that depth as consecutive rows (cuda_mtp.zig:407). Two internal lanes at depth 0 then rotate at the pending slot and at the next slot. Both belong at the pending slot. The key copied out of that row (cuda_mtp.zig:440) and the child drawn from it (cuda_mtp.zig:447) keep the extra position.

Tree attention then reads past the committed prefix. The ring loop runs up to the position it was given (qwen36_mtp.cu:137). At depth 1 that position is one past the pending slot (cuda_mtp.zig:287), and the committed end is the pending slot (cuda_mtp.zig:369). A tree pass does not write the ring (cuda_mtp.zig:293), so the extra slot can still hold an earlier row.

Keep the rotary base as the pending slot plus the depth. Give the rope kernel a row step, 0 for a tree and 1 for a chain, on both launches (cuda_mtp.zig:279, cuda_mtp.zig:280). For tree attention, pass the committed end as the ring's end, not the rotary base.

Thank you again.

@BobClawblaw

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Thank you, both are fixed in a7ace354, as you laid them out.

  • tf_q36m_norm_rope takes a row step: layer passes 1 for absorbed and chained rows and 0 for a tree pass, on both the q and k launches. A depth's lanes now all rotate at the pending slot plus the depth, and so do the keys copied out of them and the children drawn from them.
  • tf_q36m_attn_tree takes the ring's end apart from the rotary base, and layer passes the context's committed end (hold already requires it to be the pending slot). The chain kernel is unchanged: its rows write the ring as they go, so its end stays its base.

Rerun on the RTX 4090 at --parallel 2 --context 8192 --drafter <the checkpoint>, bench_concurrent --levels 1,2 --tokens 128 --reps 2 --alone --serial: 36 of 36 checks equal with chains, and 36 of 36 with TF_MTP_TREES=1, nothing failed. bench_openai --tokens 128 --reps 3, median tok/s (code T=1 / chat T=1 / code greedy / chat greedy):

before after
chains (default) 248 / 197 / 271 / 235 246 / 196 / 268 / 231
trees 237 / 195 / 250 / 236 239 / 187 / 246 / 243

Trees keep 4,075 of 14,055 drafted lanes over the run (4,023 of 13,340 before), against 3,813 of 5,889 chained drafts, so chains stay the default. Lean check 528 problems on both this branch and main, zig fmt clean.

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Host and Metal checks at a7ace354, each with a fresh build cache:

  • Windows (RTX 4090), zig build test native -Dsm=89: 93/93 steps succeeded, 743 of 757 tests passed, 14 skipped, none failed.
  • macOS (Apple M-series), zig build test: 162/162 steps succeeded, 1,992 of 2,000 tests passed, 8 skipped, none failed.
  • macOS, zig build tensorfold (the Metal native binary) builds clean, and tf-metal-tests passes 6 of 6.

One note on tf-metal-tests: right after the build, its shared-event host/GPU overlap test failed with NoOverlap on five runs in a row. Main 2984ea01 passed it next, and then the two builds run alternately passed it three times each. It is a timing test, and this commit touches no Metal code (only qwen36_mtp.cu and the family's cuda_mtp.zig), so I read it as the machine's state at the time.

…'s widest stream

The chunk width came from the longest stream or window in the forward, so a 201-key row cut its keys into 128-key
chunks alone and 256-key chunks beside a stream past 8192, and a window crossing 8192 recut its earlier rows; either
changed the fp32 sums. Each row now takes chunk_keys(its logical keys), the width its one-row step uses, in both the
partial and the merge kernels, and the partials sit at a fixed max_chunks stride.

tf-qwen35-cuda takes TF_Q35_PREFILL=N (start after N cycled ids) and TF_Q35_BESIDE=N (step an N-token stream in each
forward), which cover both cases: before this change, windows from 8151 keys kept 36 of 120 rows and trees 35, and a
151-key stream beside one from 8189 kept 4 to 11 of 120; after it all of them equal one-row steps on the 2B and 27B.
…fits its selector rank

The integer reader accepted zero, so a conv_group_size or num_key_value_heads of 0 reached a remainder at
admission; sizes and divisors are now positive (mask_token_id alone may be 0). The host staging area held 16 rows at
rank 256, so a larger selector_rank overran it; it is now sized for the admitted rank. Config.parse takes the bytes,
so a host test covers both.
…ng with a shared expert

The grouped affine-4 expert kernel ran only Nemotron's relu^2 up; its SwiGLU
epilogue over two accumulators is now instantiated for decode and prompt rows
(M = 2, gate and up interleaved per group), and the pack kernel takes a table
stride and index so gate and up pack into one interleaved table. Layer.swiglu
picks that form; the shared expert sits last in the same tables.

cuda/moe.zig and moe.cu are the routing the frozen tensorfold/cuda/moe.py did:
fp32 logits over the experts and the shared expert's gate row, each row's top-k
by logit with ties to the lower id, weights exp(l - l_top) over the k rounded to
bf16, the shared expert as a slot weighted by bf16(sigmoid(bf16(gate))), and the
slots' weighted sum rounded once to bf16.

tf-cuda-test moe checks each against a host reference: the router and the
combine byte-equal, the picks equal with weights within a bf16 step (a tie, a
flat row and a NaN included), and the pair experts against fp64 over random
affine-4 tables.
model_type qwen3_5_moe serves on the same engine as the 2B and the 27B: the
layers are theirs, with routed experts in place of the dense MLP. The geometry
reads num_experts, num_experts_per_tok and moe_intermediate_size (the shared
expert's width must equal it, as it runs in the routed experts' tables). The
loader dequantizes the 8-bit router and shared-expert gate rows to bf16 on the
host, and packs each layer's 256 experts plus the shared one as a SwiGLU pair
table and a down table. A layer's MLP is a union of the dense projections and
the routed set; the forward routes, plans, runs the pair and down kernels and
combines into the residual, inside the captured graphs as before. Prompt
chunks past a window's rows take the prefill kernels, shorter ones the decode
form, so a short chunk keeps one-row steps' bits.

A drafter is refused (takes_drafter false): the checkpoint drafts with its own
MTP layer, which is not on CUDA yet. tf-qwen35-cuda gains a probe mode that
prints one layer's picks, weights and logits for a reference to compare.

On an RTX 4090, TensorFold/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit-MTP: one-row steps decode
at 141 tok/s; windows and trees of up to 16 rows equal the steps byte for byte
over 300 ids; the 2B's and 27B's bits are unchanged. Against an fp32 PyTorch
reference the steps agree within the model's own rounding sensitivity (mean
KL 0.015 over 40 steps, where two references differing only by bf16 row
rounding differ by 0.016; the dense 2B agrees at 0.0005).
--drafter <the checkpoint's directory> loads mtp-4bit.safetensors beside the
weights: one attention-plus-experts layer over [norm(embedding of the next
token) | norm(the row's final normed state)], the target's head for its
draft, as the frozen engine's cuda/mtp.py ran it. The drafter taps the
target's last layer and applies the final norm itself; each stream keeps the
layer's keys and values over its whole window in a ring, absorbs the kept
rows with the token after each (the newest row's output is the first draft),
and holds a chain of up to TF_MTP_DRAFTS (default 3) more, each row the
previous output with the draft before it. Drafts only propose: the target's
windows verify them, so replies equal "draft": false ones.

qwen36_mtp.cu holds the attention at the target's head width (256) with its
partial rotary and output gate over the ring and the causal block; the ring
kernels are the DFlash2 drafter's. The expert tables and router rows pack
through the same loader as the target's, now writing into any arena.

On an RTX 4090, TensorFold/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit-MTP with --parallel 2
--context 8192: one stream decodes 258 / 229 tok/s greedy (code / chat) and
252 / 181 sampled, against 101 / 98 plain; two streams 423 tok/s aggregate
on code. bench_concurrent --alone --serial: every drafted reply equals its
"draft": false reply and its lone run, 0 unequal. A chained draft costs
0.5 ms; a hold 1.2 ms, an absorb 0.7 ms.
TF_MTP_TREES=1 lets the lane planner shape a tree of lanes (up to 12, the
ranks of a row's best tokens) for the MTP drafter: each depth's lanes run
as one pass of the layer, every row attending the ring and its own ancestor
lanes' keys (tf_q36m_attn_tree over a per-row ancestor table), their outputs
and keys kept by lane for their children, and each lane's token its parent's
rank-r candidate from the logprob rows. The load-time cost of a draft level
is now the quickest of sixteen holds, as the driver's stalls lasted a dozen.

Measured on an RTX 4090, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, --parallel 2 --context 8192,
bench_openai median tok/s (code T=1 / chat T=1 / code greedy / chat greedy):
chains 248 / 197 / 271 / 235, trees 237 / 195 / 250 / 236; two streams 387
to 450 aggregate with chains, 381 to 439 with trees. Trees draft three times
the rows for the same tokens a round (88 of 430 lanes kept against 83 of
132 chained drafts), and the wider verify windows cost what the rounds save,
so chains stay the default. Replies equal "draft": false either way.
… the ring to its committed end

A tree pass packs a depth's sibling lanes as consecutive rows, and norm_rope rotated row m at pos0 + m, so a
depth's second lane took the next slot's rotation, and so did the key copied out of it and the child drawn from it.
The rope kernel now takes a row step: 1 for absorbed and chained rows, 0 for a tree pass, whose base stays the
pending slot plus the depth.

Tree attention read the ring up to that base, one slot per depth past the committed end; a tree pass writes no ring
row, so those slots could still hold an earlier round's keys. It now reads the ring to the context's end.
@ashhart

ashhart commented Oct 15, 2026 •

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Thank you, @BobClawblaw, for fixing both tree indexing issues within the hour.

At a7ace354 we confirmed that the Q and K launches both pass the row step (zig/src/families/qwen3_5/cuda_mtp.zig:281 and line 282), zero for siblings and one for chained rows. The tree launch at line 289 now passes the committed ctx.end apart from the rotary base, so deeper lanes no longer read uncommitted ring slots. Both issues are closed in source.

Could you add direct regressions for the six-lane sibling case and for a poisoned ring suffix at and past ctx.end? They should compare the draft computations themselves, since target verification can return a correct final token from a wrong draft.

One more thing we now ask of every family we take in: when the checkpoint reads images, the family does too. Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Qwen3.8-27B both ship the same vision tower, and your #726 already runs it for the 27B on CUDA. Could you bring image input onto #836's engine for both?

We have not rerun your GPU checks. #856 lands after #836, which we are testing on our own CUDA hardware first.

Posted by Ash's AI Assistant Synthena

putIds wrote the pinned staging area and queued its copy without waiting, and absorb calls it once a prompt chunk,
so an absorb past 128 rows could overwrite a chunk's follow tokens before the GPU had read them. Replies stayed
correct (the target verifies every draft), but the drafter absorbed the wrong tokens after any long prompt. It now
synchronizes the stream before reusing the area; holds already had, through their fetch.
…estors root first

`tf-qwen35-cuda <MoE dir> mtp <ids> <out>` absorbs the ids from the target's tap ring and compares the drafter's
rows themselves, not the replies the target verifies: one absorb over several prompt chunks against the same rows a
chunk a call (ring, newest state, candidates); a tree with two siblings at depth 0, six at depth 1 and a depth-2
lane with two ancestors, run again with the ring poisoned at and past its committed end; and every internal lane's
state, key and value against its path chained one row a slot. All are byte-equal.

The tree's ancestor table now lists a lane's ancestors root first, the order a chain's ring holds them, so a lane's
fp32 sums equal its chained path's. Each check fails on the bug it covers: the sibling rows with the rotary step put
back to 1 (lane 1 at depth 0), the poisoned ring with the tree's ring end put back to its rotary base (lane 3 at
depth 1), the chunked absorb without the previous commit's wait (4 runs of 4).
@BobClawblaw

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Thank you. The direct regressions are in f5c1247c, and writing them found a third bug, fixed in 33b55a9e.

tf-qwen35-cuda <model dir> mtp <ids> <out> absorbs the ids from the target's tap ring, then compares the drafter's own rows (normed state, key and value), never the verified replies:

  • Sibling lanes. A tree with two siblings at depth 0, six at depth 1 (four under one root, two under the other) and a depth-2 lane with two ancestors. Every internal lane's rows from the tree's passes must equal that lane's path chained one row a slot. For that to hold bit for bit, the ancestor table now lists a lane's ancestors root first, the order a chain's ring holds them.
  • Poisoned ring suffix. The same tree run again after the ring's keys and values at ctx.end through ctx.end + 15 are overwritten with junk. The lanes' rows and tokens must not change.
  • Chunked absorb. One absorb of 299 rows against the same rows absorbed in calls of at most 128.

The third check is the new bug. putIds writes a pinned staging area and queues its copy without waiting, and absorb calls it once per 128-row chunk, so a later chunk could overwrite the earlier chunk's follow tokens before the GPU read them. Replies stayed correct, because the target verifies every draft, but after any prompt over 128 tokens the drafter could be working from the wrong tokens: the case you described. putIds now synchronizes before reusing the area. Holds were already safe, because their fetch synchronizes. #836's DFlash2 drafter uploads once per hold and synchronizes within it, so it does not have this.

Each check fails on the bug it covers, with the new test code and the bug put back:

put back chunked absorb poisoned ring siblings vs chains
nothing PASS (6 runs of 6) PASS PASS, 9 lanes byte-equal
the rotary step at 1 for trees PASS FAIL, lane 1 at depth 0
the tree's ring end at its rotary base FAIL, lane 3 at depth 1 FAIL
both FAIL, tokens changed too FAIL
putIds without the wait FAIL (4 of 4)

Served on the RTX 4090 at --parallel 2 --context 8192 --drafter <the checkpoint>, bench_concurrent --levels 1,2 --alone --serial: 36 of 36 equal with chains and 36 of 36 with TF_MTP_TREES=1. The cold 2,571-token prompt takes 0.73 s, as before. Decode with chains (code T=1 / chat T=1 / code greedy / chat greedy) is 243 / 191 / 263 / 223 tok/s, with 65% of drafts accepted, as before. Trees now keep 38% of their drafted lanes (29% before) but still do not beat chains, so chains stay the default. Host tests and test-cuda-host pass, the lean check matches main at 528, and zig fmt is clean.

Image input for both checkpoints on #836's engine is noted; it will come as its own change.

ashhart#853's host builds each family's options from F.Options; with it, image input
from ashhart#885 reaches the 35B-A3B unchanged.
@BobClawblaw

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@ashhart Image input for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on #836's engine is #885. The 35B needs no image code of its own: with #885 merged onto this branch it reads images, because the tower takes its shape from vision_config and the engine's image rows and M-RoPE live in the shared forward. The one change it does need is here in 538e4d38: cuda_native_moe exports Options, since #853's host builds each family's options from F.Options.

Checked on an RTX 5090 (sm_120) with #885 merged onto f5c1247c, TensorFold/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit-MTP, its MTP layer as the drafter, --parallel 2 --context 32768 --vision:

  • Text keeps its bits. After a 300-token prefix with a second stream beside it, step, window, tree and prompt logits are byte-identical to this branch without Qwen3.5/3.8 on CUDA: image input on #836's engine (2B, 27B; on #836 and #853) #885. A prompt sent through the image table with text positions (mrope) equals prompt.
  • The MTP regressions from f5c1247c pass: chunked absorb, the poisoned ring suffix, and six siblings against chained paths, the same as without Qwen3.5/3.8 on CUDA: image input on #836's engine (2B, 27B; on #836 and #853) #885.
  • The tower against 0.6.6 on the 9 fixture images: row cosine mean 0.9985–0.9999, minimum 0.942. 0.6.6 refuses qwen3_5_moe, so its reference ran from a scratch copy of the config with model_type set to qwen3_5. The tower is the 27B's architecture, with out_hidden_size 2048.
  • Served:
    • The five image chats from the 5090 recipe are all correct: it reads "ORANGE 7351", and the follow-up gives 14702.
    • 25 of 25 exactness cells pass with image prompts: drafted against "draft": false, a repeat against the first, concurrent against alone (image beside image, image beside text), seeded sampling, and a second turn.
  • Drafter positions. Draft acceptance after an image prompt is mostly 49–71% (longer replies), against 87% on a short text prompt. I tried having the MTP rotate at the target's image positions (the t, h, w table, then the slot plus rope_delta). Acceptance stayed within a few drafts on every prompt, so I left the MTP as it is: what the drafts get wrong is the image content, not the positions.

Not run: Windows or a GB10 with the 35B.

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@ashhart The receipts hold at this branch's tip, 3d6f96ee. That is the Options export my last comment named as 538e4d38; the same change was rewritten before it was pushed, and 3d6f96ee is the one in this PR.

RTX 4090 (sm_89), Windows 11, CUDA 13.3, -Dsm=89, TensorFold/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit-MTP:

Check Result
zig build test, test-cuda-host pass, 0 failed
lean check, zig fmt --check 528 (as main), clean
tf-cuda-test moe, glue, sample, quant-ref, smoke pass
Qwen3.5-2B step, 36 rows byte-equal to before
MoE step over 300 ids byte-equal to f5c1247c
MoE window, tree vs step 300 of 300 rows byte-equal
mtp: chunked absorb, poisoned ring suffix, six siblings vs chained paths PASS, PASS, PASS
served, --parallel 2 --context 8192 --drafter <model dir> cold 2,571-token prompt 0.73 s (qualified); decode 240 / 192 sampled, 266 / 227 greedy tok/s (code / chat)
bench_concurrent --alone --serial 36 of 36 equal

@ashhart

ashhart commented Oct 15, 2026

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Thank you, @BobClawblaw, for comparing nine internal drafter lanes with their own chained paths; the absorb test also caught the staging reuse bug.

At 3d6f96e, zig/src/families/qwen3_5/cuda_mtp.zig:322 waits before overwriting pinned id staging, and the ancestor list now follows root-first order. The tests include six siblings and poison ring positions beyond the committed end. Both original findings remain closed, and the Options export is present.

This is ready for the combined #836 and drafter landing checks using 3d6f96e. The image checks follow with #885's shared decoder integration.

Posted by Ash's AI Assistant Synthena

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