v2026.7.1

Upgrade-reliability and Intel inference deployment release. This release fixes
the remaining February-baseline bundle upgrade blockers, adds a validated Intel
Arc/XPU host-vLLM deployment path, migrates release automation to OpenBao-backed
credentials, and ratifies the portable binary-attachment shard contract.

Added

• Intel Arc/XPU host-vLLM deployment: added a Compose overlay that clears
  NVIDIA reservations and routes generation to a host OpenAI-compatible vLLM
  endpoint while retaining a separate embedding provider. The profile includes
  an example systemd service, environment guidance, a render validation gate,
  and a hardware-independent smoke test.

Fixed

• Legacy bundle authentication (#1048): existing data directories created
  with an older password default now align the application role with the
  configured POSTGRES_PASSWORD before TCP clients start.
• Pre-migration backup reliability (#1049, #1050): bundle upgrades use
  compressed pg_dump output, preflight temporary storage, fall back to
  explicitly warned disk staging when shared memory is too small, and surface
  dump failures instead of failing silently.
• Bulk reprocessing completeness (#1052): archive-wide reprocessing now
  paginates past the repository's 100-note page cap up to the requested limit.
• Intel inference routing: MATRIC_INFERENCE_DEFAULT now selects a
  configured generation provider across synchronous and streaming chat, the
  runtime registry, health probes, and model reporting. The effective
  configuration endpoint reports env-only OpenAI settings and the real default
  instead of hard-coding Ollama, while OpenAI-compatible chat retains native
  token streaming. Production API builds now include the OpenAI-compatible
  backend required by the Intel host-vLLM overlay.
• Bundle configuration (#1051): FORTEMI_ALLOW_LOCAL_ISSUER is available
  to bundled deployments and remains disabled by default.
• Release automation: Intel overlay validation installs a pinned Compose
  plugin, and documentation deployment steps run explicitly under Bash.
• Bundle image defaults: optional component build arguments retain their
  declared defaults across Docker builders, preventing PostGIS, OCR, and
  FFmpeg from being silently omitted in builds without explicit overrides.
• Bundle build context: added Docker exclusions for Rust, Node, coverage,
  distribution, VCS, and local-secret artifacts so local and CI image builds
  send only source inputs to the daemon.

Security

• OpenBao-backed CI credentials: Gitea build, image publication,
  documentation deployment, and release workflows now fetch scoped runtime
  secrets through the repository's OpenBao integration.

Documentation

• Portable shard sidecar contract (#1046): a self-contained shard may store
  each distinct attachment blob once at blobs/<64-char-lowercase-hex>, with
  JSON records retaining only the matching blake3:<hex> checksum reference.
• Reference-only compatibility: shards without sidecar entries remain valid,
  unknown or unreferenced sidecar entries are ignored, and JSON projection
  records never inline raw bytes.
• Current implementation boundary: current server shard export remains
  reference-only and server import does not restore attachment records or
  bytes. Self-contained server export/import is follow-up implementation work,
  not a feature claimed by this release.
• Backup guidance and contract evidence: reconciled the backup guide,
  architecture record, test plan, sample payloads, and documentation manifest
  with the current server behavior.
• Documentation contract hygiene: replaced two credential-shaped test DSNs
  that blocked the hosted-strict documentation contract while preserving the
  migration fixture's runtime behavior.