CW2 is a ROCm process, so it registers on the KFD like any contender. Running
it as its own systemd unit made mavgpud yield llama-server to it every few
seconds. The gemma-4-12b arm was down for eight minutes on 2026-08-09 and
routing had silently fallen back to the resident model.
So mavgpud takes an `stt` block and runs the transcriber itself. `foreign` now
excludes every child rather than one pid, which is the fix. Yielding is all or
nothing, because a job that wants the card wants all of it. Idle unloading
stays llama-server's alone: CW2 holds 1.6GB and unloading it would only send
the next voice turn to the homesrv floor.
Maven still talks to the transcriber directly on 8081. There is no proxy,
because with no idle timer there is nothing for one to measure.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013ptwopxyo3Z2kwFckHkLvN
The workstation cannot keep a 7-14B resident: it would hold 16GB against the
owner's CPT runs, Correx and the manga-recap pipeline. So the process that
stays up costs no VRAM and the model comes and goes under it.
Contention is detected by presence on the KFD, not by a VRAM threshold. A ROCm
process registers under /sys/class/kfd/kfd/proc when it initialises HIP, well
before it allocates, so we see a contender during its startup instead of after
it has already lost an allocation race. rocm-smi is not installed on that box
and a per-second subprocess would get tuned down until useless, so this reads
sysfs and forks nothing.
Free VRAM is read only to decide whether to start. It is never a reason to
stop: by the time free VRAM has dropped, the other job has already failed.