record(MODEL-TEXT-nemotron-h): the row is blocked on a kernel that landed, and a file glob is why nobody saw it

[localai-bot]

The NemotronH model-matrix row said the architecture was BLOCKED on
KERNEL-SSM-MAMBA (#496)
because "the Mamba2 SSD core is unported". That kernel landed on 2026-08-13.
The row also carried ☐ required for its spec and none for its evidence while
five specs were committed and the paged forward, the device MoE arm and the ABI
driver had all landed. This change corrects the record. It does not move the
row's lifecycle state.

FOLLOWING_AGENTS_PROTOCOL

Why a directory listing hid the blocker

#496 landed its host arm at
47960a009 (W1) and its CUDA arm at 43a6c5518 (W2). The kernel is
src/vt/cuda/cuda_mamba2_ssd.cuh — a 692-line header, #included at
cuda_gdn.cu:48 and registered as kMamba2ChunkScan at cuda_gdn.cu:6669, not
a translation unit of its own. A src/vt/*mamba* FILE GLOB therefore returns
nothing and reads as absence, and that glob is the search both the row's text and
#1074 rested on.
nemotron_h.cpp:597 calls vt::Mamba2ChunkScan today, and nemotron_h.cpp:354
calls vt::MoeRelu2. #496 stays open for its GENERIC MambaSpec producer, which
this architecture does not need, because A1 made the runner read the model's own
KV spec.

Worth carrying: #496's own issue TITLE still asserts "Mamba2 SSD core is
unported", so the false claim has a second live copy this change cannot reach.

Three claims in the row were FALSE and are corrected: the KERNEL-SSM-MAMBA
block, the non-gated relu² MoE "exists nowhere locally", and ModelOpt
MIXED_PRECISION loading "exists nowhere locally". One was TRUE and stays: the
DeepSeek-style MTP head does not exist locally, and it remains owed as W5.

The row STAYS INVENTORIED

This is the part an earlier draft of this description got wrong, and the
correction is the point of the change. That draft moved the row INVENTORIED ->
PARTIAL with the mark 🚧, the rollup INVENTORIED 324->323 and PARTIAL
22->23, and the two prose counts 53->54. None of that is in this diff.

Measured on this head against origin/main:

• the row's lifecycle cell is `INVENTORIED` on both sides;
• the rollup table .agents/model-matrix.md:76-86 is BYTE-IDENTICAL to main's
  — INVENTORIED 324, PARTIAL 22, ACTIVE 10, SPIKE 9, BLOCKED 5, DONE
  3, READY 3, GATING 1, total 377;
• scripts/check-agent-record.py derives MODEL=377 and its model inventory
  {rows: 324, memberships: 373, architectures: 356, targets: 310, modules: 261}
  unchanged.

The lifecycle move is left to whoever re-runs the gate against main. What
survives is the part that was never about a state change: the row's FALSE claims,
and its corrected code and test anchors.

The A3 gate PASSES, and it belongs to a named tree

An earlier draft recorded this gate as PENDING, because it read
#1221's pull request BODY as the
current state. That body's "Still owed: the sm_121a green-after re-run" was true
when written and stale by the time it was read. A body is a snapshot of its
author's knowledge at write time, not a live field.

The artefact is on the NAS at /usr/local/nas_share/rc/nh1157/. Verbatim from
gate_fixed.out:

TOKEN MATCH: 96/96 over 3 prompt(s) (full rows=3, short rows=0, mode=decode)
STRICT PASS

against the pinned oracle vllm=0.23.1rc1.dev1511+g555967922 on
nemotron-3.5-lightning-30b-nvfp4 at revision
29f2d1746d8f41e316523194b19018707749b1b1.

It is the DEVICE leg. The binary is libvllm 0.0.3+cuda, and cfg.log
records fp4-mma, cutlass-nvfp4 and cutlass-fp8 as ENABLED for [121a]. The
run logs Asynchronous scheduling is enabled (max_concurrent_batches=2), which
is precisely where device_token_ids is non-null; on the host queue it is always
null and the #1157 defect
cannot arise. The decisive evidence is neither of those: the same binary on the
same checkpoint with only nemotron_h_device.cpp reverted to the fix's
parent scores 4/24 (full rows=0, short rows=3) and bails at 8 generated tokens.
A host-leg run would have been unmoved by that revert. The delta is the proof;
the pass on its own is not.

The pass was measured on the tree that landed as 0ea5d249f, and there is no
run against current main. #1221 MERGED on 2026-08-18 as 0ea5d249f, which is
main's last touch of nemotron_h_device.cpp, so the repair the 96/96 depended
on is on main. That is not the same fact as a gated main: the 96/96 was taken
on that branch tree, main has advanced since, and nobody has re-run it. Every
row here therefore names the SHA the measurement belongs to and records no pass
on main. An earlier draft of this description instead called that branch "OPEN
and CONFLICTING" with "the merge is owed", and quoted a shipped cell as reading
"on #1221's OPEN branch, not on main". Neither is true here, and that quoted
text ships nowhere: grep -c "OPEN branch" over docs/ and
.agents/model-matrix.md is 0.

No throughput, latency or memory figure is claimed anywhere in this change.
gate_fixed.out carries 264.4s to load and 327-343s per 32-token prompt. That is
a correctness run whose lm_head and 46 FP8 mamba projections still execute
host-side. Both public rows say "NOT a benchmark" in those words. One config
caveat travels with the run: --gpu-memory-utilization 0.92 did not size the KV
pool, which fell back to 256 blocks
(#83).

The stale ## Owed bullet for #1217

The ## Owed entry for #1217
in .agents/specs/nemotron-h-model.md was written while #1221 was open, and this
branch ADDED it: origin/main carries the phrase "open and unmerged" zero times.
It was false three ways at its own head, and the last commit repairs it.

the bullet said	this head has
#1221 "is open and unmerged"	merged 2026-08-18 as 0ea5d249f
#1217 "is recorded NOWHERE in this tree"	.agents/issue-index.md:404 and nemotron-h-a2p-paged-forward.md:901
"the standing reason this row's end-to-end gate is not a pass"	the same file's ## Now records 96/96 STRICT PASS

The "recorded nowhere" claim WAS true at b626be75a, which is verifiable —
git show b626be75a:.agents/issue-index.md | grep -c 1217 is 0. The merge
8a00afcbe brought both records in. Both anchors were re-derived at this head:
issue-index.md:404 carries the row under the owning row
MODEL-NEMOTRON-H-ABI-A2P, and nemotron-h-a2p-paged-forward.md:901 is the
first bullet under that spec's ## 11. Owed.

The duplicate-key argument for withholding an index row is kept as history and
marked expired. Appending a row now would create the very duplicate that argument
was written to avoid, because the row is already on main. Nothing is owed to
this reconcile for #1217. The issue stays open as a seam defect owned by
MODEL-NEMOTRON-H-ABI-A2P.

Two defects found and fixed in flow

docs/BENCHMARKS.md carried the key NemotronH paged forward twice on this
branch and once on main, because the branch APPENDED where it should have
UPDATED, and the two rows contradicted each other (4/24 with a re-run pending,
versus 96/96). They are collapsed to one row on the key. grep -c for that key
is now 1 here and 1 on main. Nothing gates this:
scripts/check-public-doc-tables.py holds the page's size and shape, not its key
uniqueness. The row's position moved when the duplicate was collapsed and it now
follows Record-anchor ratchet; the key and content are correct, and reordering a
file that other pull requests edit was not worth the conflict.

docs/STATUS.md was restructured under this branch by
#1491, which reorganised it by
surface and deleted the per-model table, so the merge conflicted for real. The
page is resolved to main's whole and the record is re-expressed as a one-line
in-place edit to the Text generation row.

A latent defect this branch introduced, and the replay that removes it

The row's corrected cell-6 prose linked #496's spec inline as
[#496](…) ([spec](specs/mamba2-ssd.md)). scripts/check-doc-checkpoint.py's
spec_for_row takes the first specs/*.md link anywhere in the row line, so
that parenthetical shadowed the row's own spec: MODEL-TEXT-nemotron-h resolved
to mamba2-ssd.md instead of nemotron-h-model.md. On origin/main the same row
resolves correctly to nemotron-h-model.md, so this branch introduced it.

This is not a gate artifact, and the squash would not have absorbed it. The
shadowing lands and persists: every future lifecycle move of this row would
demand a ## Now from mamba2-ssd.md, a spec whose author has no reason to
touch it, with nothing pointing back at the row that caused it. The fix is
correct on its own merits; the gate going red was how it was found, not why it
is being made.

It surfaced because #1577, #1609 and #1621 landed on main under this branch and
gave the checker sight of the states it had been blind to — PARTIAL joined
STATES, INVENTORIED joined the new RECORD_STATES. 414a8002b moves this row
PARTIAL -> INVENTORIED, which is a real move the old checker could not see.

errors_for is strictly per-commit (commits_in_range -> errors_for(paths, parent, commit)), so no later commit can pay the debt. The 27 branch commits were
therefore replayed with git filter-branch --index-filter, scoped
rewrite-1081 --not origin/main so that no commit of main was rewritten.

Proof, not assertion:

• origin/main at replay time (e100e64e1) was NOT rewritten: it still resolves
  as itself and remains an ancestor of the head.
• git diff <old-head> <new-head> is one file, one line — the parenthetical.
• All 27 old/new pairs compared: the only path that differs is
  .agents/model-matrix.md, and author name, author email, author date,
  committer name, committer email, committer date and subject are byte-identical
  on every pair. The five commits that never contained the string kept their
  original SHAs, because the filter is a no-op on them.
• The shadowing string now occurs 0 times across all 27 commits, and
  mamba2-ssd.md is still linked from the row's Spike/spec cell, so no
  reference is lost.

Which projections this change owes, and why

scripts/check-doc-checkpoint.py was instrumented on this exact diff rather than
reasoned about. classify() returns classes {'feature_surface'} and
lifecycle_moves [], and MEASUREMENT_RECORDS is
('.agents/benchmark-record.md',), which this change does not touch.

An earlier revision of this description said the checker's STATES tuple
"contains neither INVENTORIED nor PARTIAL, so it is structurally blind to
this row's state". That was true when measured and is false at this head, and
the conclusion survives while the reason inverts. After #1577, #1609 and #1621 the
gate SEES both states and reports no lifecycle move across origin/main -> head,
because the row genuinely does not move: INVENTORIED on both sides. A gate that
looks and finds nothing is a stronger result than a gate that cannot look.

docs/STATUS.md, docs/BENCHMARKS.md and the spec's ## Now are therefore
written because AGENTS.md ## Public documents owes them, not because a gate
asked. docs/FEATURES.md IS touched, at :151: the NemotronHForCausalLM row
said nothing about the end-to-end token gate before, and its correctness column
now reads "A3 e2e gate 96/96 STRICT PASS on GB10 at 0ea5d249f (#1221); NO run
against current main".

The docs/STATUS.md edit takes oversized_cells from 2 to 3 against a ratchet of
44, and long_paragraphs stays 0 against 75. No ratchet is raised.

.agents/issue-index.md

GitHub does not run the merge=union driver .gitattributes:7 sets, so this
branch has repeatedly discarded the union auto-merge, taken main's file whole,
and re-appended only the rows whose KEY main lacks: #1074 and #1080. main
already carries a #1068 row, so that one is not re-appended.

Measured on this head against origin/main: 565 rows, of which main's 563 are
all present, in order, byte-identical; 0 removed; exactly 2 added.
scripts/check-issue-index-append-only.py exits 0. The file is not a strict BYTE
prefix of main's, because main's newer rows follow this branch's two; the
append-only rule is about rows rather than bytes.

#1080 is re-measured rather than carried: after this change repairs
nemotron-h-model.md's ## 7. Now to ## Now, 15 specs still write the
numbered spelling, up from the twelve #1080 was filed against. A growing
population is the argument for the checker-semantics fix over a rename sweep, and
both need their own spec and a red-before test. It is listed under ## Owed in
nemotron-h-model.md.

Reconciling with #1415, which landed on both Nemotron rows

main gained the A2-Q2b device lm_head (#1415) while this branch was open, and
it edited the same two pages. These were real content conflicts, not the
union-driver artifact the index produces. Both were resolved BY KEY, and neither
side is discarded.

docs/BENCHMARKS.md was POSITIONAL rather than a same-key dispute. This branch had
already moved NemotronH paged forward below Record-anchor ratchet when it
collapsed that key's duplicate, and #1415 inserted a NEW key at the old offset.
Three-way: main did not touch NemotronH paged forward since the merge base, so
this branch's version stands, and NemotronH host re-expansion / decode token is a
main-only key taken verbatim. Each key occurs exactly once.

The reflex resolution here is wrong, and nothing would have caught it. Taking
main's version of the conflicted region — the ordinary move when the other side
looks newer — would have re-created the exact duplicate this pull request exists
to remove, because our copy of that key lives further down the file and the
conflicted region is not where the key now is. It would also have looked clean:
scripts/check-public-doc-tables.py holds these pages' size and shape and does
NOT test key uniqueness, which is
#1543. A gate could not have
caught the regression. Only decomposing the conflict BY KEY, and asking the
three-way question "did the other side actually touch this key", separated a
position collision from a content disagreement. Anyone resolving a conflict in a
keyed projection in this tree should assume the same trap.

docs/FEATURES.md is the same key, NemotronHForCausalLM, changed by both sides
in disjoint cells. Cell 3 changed only here, adding the A3 gate result. Cell 4
changed only on main, moving device lm_head out of the owed list and recording
it UNMEASURED. The row is composed from both, so nothing is adjudicated and nothing
is dropped.

#1415 landing does not gate this row, and this merge does not upgrade the
claim. Cell 3 still reads "NO run against current main". A device lm_head
that reaches the device is not a run of this row's end-to-end token gate. FP8
mamba stays owed, because A2-Q1 (#1289) is still DRAFT.

Verified rather than trusted: every other key in both pages is byte-identical to
main; docs/STATUS.md auto-merged with Text generation as its only differing
key, no key added or lost; the model-matrix rollup is byte-identical and the row is
still INVENTORIED on both sides.

Gates

Run on 1b741c66baec6c9660aa80af3a82c0f5eca24dd9, this pull request's head, with
origin/main at e7f38e0c01ff1d85d18ef64eadd98996743ca061.

scripts/agent-preflight.sh --fail-on-skip reports ZERO gates SKIPPED, and
doc-checkpoint range is ok. RANGE_COUNT is 28. Both trailer gates were
proven to READ that range by mutation rather than read off a green line: a
detached scratch commit with no trailer block makes check-commit-trailers.py
exit 1 naming 3aeb80e9b769, and a scratch commit whose subject ends in a period
makes check-commit-style.py exit 1 naming 487921ac602c. The tree was restored
to 1b741c66b after each, verified by SHA and a clean git status.

doc-checkpoint is green for the right reason, and that was falsified too.
check-doc-checkpoint.py --commit 4dff5158b (the replayed 414a8002b) exits 0
while the PARTIAL -> INVENTORIED move is still present; renaming that spec's
## Now heading in a scratch amend takes it to exit 1 with
".agents/specs/nemotron-h-model.md has no ## Now section". So the gate passes
because the obligation is satisfied, not because the move vanished.

One trap worth recording: the FIRST attempt at that mutation read as passing. It
was run from a tree checked out at 4dff5158b, which predates the merge that
brought #1577 in, so it executed the OLD blind checker against the new commit.
The instrument was the stale thing, not the result.

Bare, on the same head, each exit 0:

check-doc-checkpoint.py --base e7f38e0c0 --head HEAD   OK
check-public-doc-tables.py                             OK
check-supported-models.py                              OK: exactly the 40 registered architectures
check-agent-record.py                                  ENGINE=169 MODEL=377 QUANT=84 KERNEL=57 BACKEND=85 ANCHOR-ROT=37
check-issue-index-append-only.py                       OK: issue index append-only
check-symbol-anchors.py                                OK every symbol anchor still finds what it names
check-now-current.py                                   OK

scripts/agent-preflight.sh exits 1 on test_cpu_x86_llamacpp_floor ALONE. That
is #618 and not a finding: the
harness reported waiting for quiet: 15s busy=109% builders=0 load=29.97. The
test reads scripts/cpu-x86-llamacpp-floor.sh and
docs/bench-evidence/cpu-x86-llamacpp-20260811.md, and this change touches
neither — it touches six record files and zero code files.

Inherited, not introduced

windows-msvc-cpu and windows-msvc-vulkan fail on every pull request and have
no main baseline (#584,
#968). This change has zero code
files and cannot reach a compiler.

Closes #1074

Following-Agents-Protocol: true
AI-Assisted: true
Assisted-by: AGENT:claude-opus-5 [claude-code]