colibri 1.12.0

81 pull requests since v1.11.0. A new way to ask a model a closed question, a redesigned dashboard and landing page, and a long run of small failures that used to answer 500 or die on a locale.

Brio mode: score a closed set instead of generating

• #1632: brio mode, on all nine engines. Hand the engine the options an answer is allowed to take and it reports the probability of each one instead of writing the answer: the option tokens are read, not sampled, so completion_tokens is 0 and no reply can fall outside the list. It is opt-in per request through two SUBMIT keys, logprobs=k and pin=1; without them every frame is byte-identical to before, which is asserted per engine rather than claimed. max_tokens=0 became legal, but only together with logprobs>0.
• The shared contract is three headers: decode_batch.h for the logprob tail, serve_codec.h for the wire, and pin_pool.h for nested state snapshots, so a request can keep one photograph of the shared instructions and a deeper one of the instructions plus the question. With one level the question is re-read once per option; with two, four items cost 176 tokens instead of 496.
• kv_prefix_holds() is the guard that makes the snapshots safe: a snapshot is reused only when the prefix record still holds the same ids, because a K/V bank can be dropped between two options.
• Exactness is measured, not asserted: the logprobs read from a snapshot match a cold recomputation to 0.00e+00 on all nine tiny fixtures, and on the two real checkpoints available (qwen36 at 22 GB and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 476 GB).
• Three clients: POST /v1/brio on the gateway, /brio in coli chat, and a page in the dashboard. docs/brio.md has the request, the reply, the normalisation choice and the cases where the mode does not help.
• The endpoint takes three forms. options is one closed question. questions is many questions on one state, each with its own options, with the state photographed once and the snapshots ordered by the server. schema is an object of field to allowed values: the server writes the JSON skeleton and fills it one field at a time, so the object is valid by construction and every value is one the caller allowed, each with its own probability and entropy. Both were measured before they were exposed: the 5.7x and the 2.4x above are these two forms.

The dashboard and the landing page

• #1633: the web dashboard is redesigned around a workspace and a navigation dock, with a brio page that reads a document once and asks it several questions, each with its own option set, and a light and dark theme.
• #1635: the landing page lists the models as a searchable list instead of a card grid, gains a brio section, and gets a light and dark theme built on the mechanism proposed in [#1551]. The shipping version and the family names are generated from c/version.py and c/family_registry.py, so the page cannot claim eight families again while nine are running. The hero plays a recorded session rather than a mock-up.

Performance

• #1477: one routed-expert kernel, expert_ffn.h, shared by the MoE engines and used by qwen36 first: int4 kept planar in RAM instead of unpacked to int8, and two OpenMP regions per layer instead of three per expert. 12.8 to 15.7 tok/s with the resident set down from 29 to 17 GB, output identical.
• #1424: a CUDA VRAM tier for Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, 43 % on one 8 GB card and 60 % on two.
• #1553 and #1558: the previous turn's KV is reused instead of re-prefilling the transcript, on qwen36, olmoe and DeepSeek V4.1, with a resumed prefill that is exact.
• #1521 and #1524: the mHC mix and the KDA convolution and head loops run in parallel, bit-identical, for 3.9 % and 3.0 %.
• #1517: the four engines that never sized their OpenMP team now do.
• #1522: the DeepSeek V4.1 expert stream can be read from more than one drive; #1455 weights glm53 expert reads by disk and honours COLI_MODEL_MIRROR; #1543 fixes the V4 mirror cache on unified memory.
• #1495: less overhead in the sparse router's top-K selection.

Fixed

• Requests that answered 500 engine failed and now answer properly: a non-object json_schema (#1587), an unpaired surrogate escape (#1589), a non-object tool_choice.function (#1598), and a tool call whose arguments are not an object.
• #1595: the grammar draft walker switched itself off after about sixty repetitions. #1596: a nested array schema doubled the compiled grammar at every level.
• #1483 and #1514: olmoe, inkling and glm53 refuse an over-long prompt with CONTEXT_EXCEEDED instead of failing late.
• #1549: the lazy shard-mapping table in st.h was published without synchronisation and glm53 reached it from an OpenMP region.
• #1557: a truncated multibyte tail made the qwen36 tokenizer read past the prompt. #1530: an integer overflow check in kimi_k3.c.
• #1631: coli serve reaches the expert-history save when it is stopped with SIGTERM, not only on Ctrl-C. #1628: the expert grid is resent after every turn, so the dashboard stops showing the cold snapshot forever.
• #1608: coli doctor matches core tensor roles by component instead of by one family's spelling.
• #1526, #1584, #1585, #1536: the planner, the auto-tuner and the registry agree about which engine is running, and stop advising GLM-only knobs on every family.
• #1489: coli bench ran the GLM engine on any model. #1503: every engine is handed its model directory through SNAP. #1486 and #1488: a directory without config.json names no engine, and coli convert refuses an output directory that already holds one.

Windows, macOS and locales

• #1515, #1560, #1561, #1562, #1516: the chat, coli run, coli tune and the datapoint harness no longer die when an engine line, a prompt or a dash does not fit the console code page.
• #1537, #1579, #1535: the qwen36 CUDA_DLL build on Windows gets its tier, is recognised, and the device probe loads the backend before counting devices. #1563: the Inkling dense int4 converter finishes.
• #1599: MacPorts libomp built every macOS engine single-threaded. #1548: Metal falls back to MTLCopyAllDevices when there is no system default device. #1504: olmoe measures available RAM on macOS and Windows too.

Diagnostics

• #1494, #1506, #1512: PROF reports block time, head time, matmul, attention and lm_head, at microsecond resolution, on deepseek_v4, olmoe and qwen36. #1555: CONSIST=1 checks prefill against decode.
• #1482: configurable generation statistics in coli chat, with exact token throughput when the server reports it.
• #1468, #1487, #1480: a failure in the MoE step, a missing core tensor and duplicate tensor names are diagnosed by name instead of by a generic message.

Docs and licence

• #1540 and #1541: the copyright holder is named and a NOTICE file is added.
• #1294: a reproducible benchmarking protocol; #1508: a GPU-backend datapoint needs a correctness line to be accepted.
• #1471 and #1473: the expired Discord invite is replaced in all four READMEs and on the site.

Builds for Linux x86_64, macOS arm64 and Windows x86_64 are attached below by the release workflow, with SHA256SUMS.txt.