PolyStrata 0.1.43.1-poly.1

Strata's 0.1.43 and 0.1.43.1 are in, and AMD cards keep their attention caches whole.

What changed since 0.1.42-poly.4

• The Strata project's 0.1.43 and 0.1.43.1 are merged (their notes). Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, which runs on Strata's own engine, takes everything in them. For the five added models what reaches you is the server and the tools: a request's pictures are encoded on the engine's turn and a client that leaves meanwhile is let go at once; a tool call the model writes as fenced JSON inside its tags is read; a user message that quotes </tool_call> is text; a refused batch slot gets another one or a 503 instead of a broken conversation; a failed before_load hook checks the free VRAM; POST /unload?wait=1; timings.prompt_n counts what the engine read. New: BENCH.bat (./bench.sh) measures your install through the API in 5 to 10 minutes and writes a report in the community format; it read CMakeLists.txt in the Windows code page, which stopped it on a Chinese or Japanese Windows, fixed here.
• On an AMD card the attention caches take their VRAM at load: setup writes --kv-whole into the config and adds it to an older one on update. ROCm keeps the VRAM the expert cache gives back as a conversation grows, so a long prompt was refused with "no VRAM for the attention cache" (#13, iMilnb, who found the cause). With the caches whole, 32K of context fits on an RX 7600 with 8 GB beside 4,592 of Qwen3.6's experts. His benchmark on that card is in docs/AMD_HIP.md and the community table: Qwen3.6 UD-Q2_K_XL 74 tokens/s in a short chat, 53 after a 32K prompt read at 481; Ornith APEX-I-Mini 40 and 43, read at 444.
• The experts on the card and on the CPU do not give the same greedy tokens, on CUDA as on HIP: the two sum in a different order and a near tie goes the other way after some tens of tokens. Measured on an RTX 5090 and written next to his finding.

The engine's shared CUDA kernels changed with the merge, so the zip below is a new ready-made Windows engine; the installer downloads it and checks its SHA-256. On an RTX 5090 it gives the same tokens as 0.1.42-poly.4's on Qwen3.6 and GLM 5.3 Flash, at the same speed.

How fast

The tables did not change: 0.1.42-poly.3, the README and docs/BACKENDS.md.

Install

Download the source below, or git clone the repository. Then run START-HERE.bat on Windows or ./setup.sh on Linux. An earlier install updates with UPDATE.bat or ./update.sh.

Limits

• The five added models are experimental, measured on two machines, a pair of RTX 3080s and one RX 7600.
• The ready-made engine is for Windows and CUDA 13 only; CUDA 12 and AMD cards compile on your PC.
• GLM 5.3 Flash needs about 100 GB of RAM, and about 8 GB more than its file in a container.
• AMD cards on Windows run Qwen3.8-Flash-Next only.

Most of this project is the work of Strata's author and contributors.