Skip to content

Hebrus v0.1.0 — Historical DwarfStar release

Choose a tag to compare

View all tags
@andreaborio andreaborio released this 17 Jul 15:51
· 191 commits to main since this release
v0.1.0
1873fe7

DwarfStar v0.1.0

Release date: 2026-07-17

This is the first numbered release of the andreaborio/ds4 fork. It promotes
the measured Qwen3.6-35B-A3B Metal stack and introduces the single-file
DS4-native expert-major GGUF.

What ships

  • Resident Qwen prefill and decode kernels, bounded macro-prefill, expert
    grouping, I/O overlap, phase-aware cache growth, prompt lookup, and the
    pressure-aware 16 GiB planner.

  • One expert-major store used by both resident Metal buffers and SSD cache
    fills.

  • Automatic loading of the embedded ds4.expert_major.v1 GGUF tensor.

  • A transactional converter and offline verifier:

    make ds4-qwen-pack
./ds4-qwen-pack native SOURCE.gguf SOURCE.experts.pack OUTPUT.gguf
./ds4-qwen-pack verify-native SOURCE.gguf OUTPUT.gguf

  • Legacy canonical Qwen GGUF and explicit sidecar support for migration and
    A/B testing.

The release model is
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-DS4-ExpertMajor-v1-Q4_K_S.gguf: 20,808,970,240
bytes with SHA-256
fb2b344d49f0c3dfd854cfc11d92ffc873cc93a1d30bf4664e5aea6f1bfef839.
It is only 406,816 bytes larger than its canonical input; routed weights are
stored once, not duplicated.

Format boundary

ds4.expert_major.v1 is intentionally model-specific: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B,
40 layers, 256 routed experts, Q4_K gate/up/down records. The artifact remains
a GGUF v3 container, but generic loaders cannot execute its routed weights.
They should fail on the absent canonical tensor names.

Use the canonical GGUF with llama.cpp, MLX, CUDA, ROCm, or any loader that does
not explicitly implement this extension. The native artifact is the preferred
download only for this DS4 release on Apple Metal.

Integrity and failure behavior

The converter verifies the source hash, sidecar payload hash and index, copies
all non-routed tensors and metadata byte-for-byte, reopens the store at its
embedded offset, rehashes it, fsyncs, and only then renames the output.

A missing or invalid legacy sidecar falls back to canonical tensors. An invalid
embedded store is fatal before inference: the native file contains no second
routed layout, so fallback would be semantically unsafe.

Validation gates

  • Clean Metal and CPU builds.
  • Model-free Qwen expert-store, expert-group, and Metal lifecycle tests.
  • Native converter fixture with a non-zero embedded offset.
  • Canonical versus native model-backed parity at 2K, 8K, and 16K contexts.
  • A bounded M1 Pro 16 GiB SSD smoke.

The model-backed parity matrix and artifact identity are recorded in
docs/qwen-expert-major-store.md. The final native/sidecar/native publication
gate was byte-identical at 2K, 4K, 8K, and 16K; the exact commands and evidence
hashes are in docs/benchmarks/2026-07-17-qwen-native-expert-major.md.

DeepSeek and GLM

DeepSeek and GLM are not mislabeled as v1-compatible. Their expert types and
per-layer geometry can vary, so they require a generic versioned manifest plus
their own correctness and performance matrices. That work follows this release
and will retain canonical loading until each native artifact clears those
gates. The reusable format contract and independent promotion sequence are in
docs/expert-major-v2-roadmap.md.

Assets 2
Loading