v0.1.8-alpha.2

Second cycle of contributor PRs landing in the same calendar day. Five PRs merged (#71, #72, #73, #74, #75), three Codex-flagged config-path hardening passes on the just-merged DDTree wire-up, plus a stale-path bugfix that was blocking 27B DFlash measurement in the speed-gate.

See CHANGELOG.md for full notes.

Highlights

• gfx12 WMMA dispatch is now feature-complete for HFQ4 prefill on RDNA4. PR #71 (@RobinVanCauter) closes the residual GEMM gap. R9700 numbers vs master: 9B prefill +29.7%/+31.3% (pp32/pp128), 27B prefill +27.8%/+42.4%.
• DDTree wire-up + Path C PRD (PR #72, @flamme-demon). Opt-in via HIPFIRE_DDTREE_BUDGET=<n>; default decode path bit-exact preserved. Local validation on 7900 XTX with Qwen3.6-27B + DFlash MQ4 draft: 12/12 attractor-clean across the path-c-smoke.sh --full battery, on the exact target/draft pair where Paths A/B1 single-token-attractor failed.
• gfx908 / MI100 CDNA1 bring-up (PR #67, @linus-amg). Wave64 dispatch on 4 fused projection sites + a new fused_gate_up_hfq4g256_wave64 kernel. Cross-process verified: 9B decode +9.3%, 4B decode +4.9%, A3B MoE decode +11.0% on real 2× MI100. New tests/speed-baselines/gfx908.txt.
• Opt-in HFQ4 MMQ prefill path (PR #73, @KotDath). Q8_1 + i8 WMMA over 128×128 tiles, gated to HIPFIRE_MMQ=1 on RDNA3/3.5. Targets the Strix Halo prefill gap vs llama.cpp (#60); +19.8% on 4B pp256 (gfx1100) once batch amortizes.

API

• /v1/chat/completions thinking-mode fix (#74). Per-model max_think_tokens was silently dropped on the OpenAI-compatible API path, causing empty message.content on thinking-mode models. Reproducer in #74. Also fixed prompt_tokens: 0 hardcode.

CLI

• hipfire list shows .mq6 models (PR #75, @Nereuxofficial).

Speculative decode hardening

• HFQ6 WMMA graph-capture safety — all 6 HFQ6 WMMA wrappers (3 gfx11 + 3 gfx12) migrated to graph-capture-safe launch path. Closed a hipGraph dangling-kernarg bug class on the 6-bit prefill path.
• DDTree daemon config hardening — three Codex-flagged crashable env-var paths in the just-merged DDTree wire-up: budget cap (256), topk cap (kernel-aligned at 8), Path_C value validation. Replaces silent OOM / silent fallback with clear stderr lines.

Tooling

• scripts/speed-gate.sh 27B DFlash draft path fix (#61). Reported by @m0n5t3r as MISSING_DRAFT despite the file being downloaded — gate was hardcoding the legacy filename. Now accepts both names.

Issues filed for follow-up

• #65 — gfx12 WMMA: tune 9B prefill (multi-row, K-tile, s_prefetch, launch_bounds). RDNA4 follow-up to PR #71. Hardware: R9700 / 9070 XT.
• #70 — gfx908 / MI100 CDNA1: port MFMA prefill kernels (4 kernels + channel-tests). Closes ~35× prefill gap vs gfx1100.
• #41 — DDTree on gfx1100 RoPE phase-skew. Superseded by PR #72's Path C orchestrator (different mechanism, attractor-clean). Closing in 7 days unless reopened.

Known issues

• #60 reporter (@h2252) hit a --gen 0 panic on bench_qwen35_mq4 pre-alpha.2. Cannot reproduce on master; many of today's commits could have addressed it incidentally. If you hit this on alpha.2, please retry with RUST_BACKTRACE=1 and post the trace on #60.
• #68 (Windows + qwen3.6:27b VL trace) — root-caused to the v0.1.0-alpha-pinned daemon.exe; alpha.1's fresh binary should resolve. Awaiting reporter confirmation.
• #50 (gfx1152 / Strix Halo APU segfault) — different SKU than the gfx1151 work that landed today. Awaiting bt + dmesg + cache-clean repro.

Upgrade

hipfire update                      # if installed via curl-bash
# or
git pull && cargo install --path crates/engine

Windows: re-run install.ps1. The dynamic-release-query (#69) will pull the fresh daemon.exe automatically; asset-id cache stamp prevents stale-binary preservation.

Windows binaries

All three (daemon.exe, infer.exe, run.exe) are attached as release assets, cross-compiled from Linux via x86_64-pc-windows-gnu against the v0.1.8-alpha.2 commit. hip-bridge does runtime LoadLibraryW of amdhip64.dll, so no link-time HIP dependency.