# Maintenance review handoff — distributed GGUF runtime

Date: 2026-07-14
Scope: close the maintenance review, preserve the hard blockers, and hand off the remaining implementation work to the next model.

## What is complete

- Completed stories are now recorded in `docs/issues/distributed-gguf-runtime/`.
- The PRD and milestone docs were updated to reflect the closed set and the blocked set.
- The DGR-018 preflight scripts were preserved at commit `a0f28b5`.
- The current feature line has delivered DGR-001 through DGR-006 and DGR-017.

## Hard / unsolved issues for later

### 1) DGR-018 requires hardware we do not have

DGR-018 is blocked because the whole-model GLM-5.2 UD-IQ1_S oracle requires:

- a **256-GiB-class host**,
- at least **224 GiB runtime-accessible memory**,
- at least **250 GB free storage on one filesystem outside `/home`**.

The current development host reports only **124.9 GiB MemTotal** and has no eligible filesystem with 250 GB free.
The authoritative blocker evidence is in `evidence/DGR-018/BLOCKED.md` and `evidence/DGR-018/preflight.json`.

### 2) DGR-019 and DGR-020 are transitively blocked

- **DGR-019** needs the DGR-018 oracle for parity certification.
- **DGR-020** needs DGR-018 and DGR-019, plus enough physical consumer nodes that no single node can admit the whole recipe.

No smaller model may be substituted for these stories.

### 3) The remainder of the graph stays blocked unless replanned

The current graph makes **DGR-007 depend on DGR-019**, which means:

- DGR-007 through DGR-016 are also blocked transitively.
- Unblocking the dense pipeline without the 256-GiB host would require an explicit replanning decision to relax the DGR-007 → DGR-019 dependency.
- That replanning decision has **not** been made.

### 4) Maintenance-only tasks should stay separate from feature implementation

The review uncovered that the codebase now has a clean closed-story split, but further work should avoid mixing:

- maintenance cleanup,
- blocked-hardware preparation,
- and actual distributed GLM implementation.

The next model should treat the maintenance pass as closed and only pick up real implementation work that is not hardware-blocked.

## Recommended next move

Use the next model to continue on the **non-blocked implementation queue** only.
Priority candidates are whatever is still actionable without the GLM oracle host; if a story depends on DGR-018, keep it deferred.

## Reference files

- `docs/issues/distributed-gguf-runtime/README.md`
- `.scratch/distributed-gguf-runtime/PRD.md`
- `.scratch/distributed-gguf-runtime/milestones.md`
- `.scratch/distributed-gguf-runtime/evidence/DGR-018/BLOCKED.md`
- `.scratch/distributed-gguf-runtime/evidence/DGR-018/preflight.json`