- Drop the K % 2 entry rejection and the per-K if/else load-width branch: the weight stream now anchors uint4 loads at each row's first 16-byte-aligned address, with scalar head/tail sweeps covering at most 14 remainder elements, so any positive K and any storage offset is correct
- Keep one pure-uint4 loop (no branching inside the loop) for the production case where every x row base is 16-byte aligned (K % 8 == 0 with allocator-aligned tensors) and a scalar-x pairing loop only for unaligned K, where per-row uint4 loads are not addressable; measured cost of scalar x everywhere was up to 2.5x on multi-row shapes (down M=4 28.4us vs 11.3us)
- Remove the now-obsolete k_aligned axis and K divisibility gate from the linear dispatch spec since the primitive no longer rejects any K
- Add test coverage for unaligned K (7, 12, 100, 1534) at M=1 and M=3
Benchmark: 8x L20 (sm_89, CUDA 12.8), L2-resident microbench, 300 iters; hot path unchanged within noise vs the pure-uint4 kernel (q M=2 5.8us, down M=4 11.3us, lm M=1 391us); full gate green
- Replace per-element loads with 128-bit uint4 vectorized loads (8 halves per access), improving every measured shape: q/k/v at M=2 from 6.0us to 5.4us, q_proj speedup 2.28-2.45x, mlp_down at M=4 2.76x, lm_head at M=1 +6-8%
- Extend kernel M support from {1,2,4,8} to all M in 1-8 via new BLOCK_M cases 3,5,6,7, since cuBLAS wmma templates pad small M to 8/16 rows and waste compute
- Keep the auto-dispatch allowlist unchanged: a 64-step greedy-walk probe on the real decode path showed mlp_down (K=6912) divergence at step 1 and argmax flips for every candidate odd-M band, the same noise class already present in the merged M=2/4 entries, so no entry has the stability evidence the gate requires
- Rejected alternatives with measurements: split-K accumulation (k/v shapes regress 6.0us to 9.2us, code removed) and MMA tiles (small M is DRAM-bound at ~1 FLOP/byte vs the ~138 needed)
- Update test_gemv M-rejection case to M=9 and test_linear_dispatch multirow fallback to M=9 for the widened range
Benchmark: 8x L20 (sm_89, CUDA 12.8), single-GPU microbench, 200 iters after 20 warmup, weights L2-resident; q(1536x1536) M=3 8.9->5.3us, kv(256x1536) M=3 8.7->3.0us, down(1536x6912) M=3 53.5->10.3us; full gate 691 passed, test_bf16_gemv_uses_current_stream passes in isolation after GPU contention rerun
- add decode-shape benchmark harness
- add bf16 GEMV CUDA primitive with head-dim generic kernel
- dispatch decode-time linear layers to gemv for M=1
- extend gemv coverage to small decode batches
- add astrai/extension/dispatch.py: per-family decision tables over composable Specs with explicit-strict / implicit-loose resolution, ASTR_OPS env overrides, profile presets, and explain traces
- make the axis schema family-owned: register_family takes an axes extractor that snapshots whatever decision axes that family needs from the call, and the core only supplies the axis() predicate vocabulary plus a tensor_axes helper
- drop the central CallContext dataclass; resolve and explain take the raw call arguments, so unregistered handles are probed through supports_call on the same args
- migrate attention and rotary onto family-owned axes with behavior-preserving specs and spec-vs-supports_call mirror tests
- replace the non-ASCII member-of glyph in spec descriptions with plain ASCII " in "
- Move task_alloc/task_free/task_extend/task_cached/task_record_hashes and bind from the PagePool card to a new TaskCacheManager card matching pool.py
- Drop the nonexistent Executor tokenizer attribute and association, add task_cache instead
- Add AllocationStrategy/ContiguousStrategy/PagedStrategy cards and point Allocator/RadixCache composition at PagedStrategy
- Add TaskCacheManager and the allocation strategies to the module overview, add _task_cache to InferenceScheduler
- Fix the design-pattern count in the table of contents (15 -> 16)
- Rewrite the FlashAttnBackend class docstring: packed decode gathers flat K/V via req_to_token and calls flash_attn_varlen_func; dense prefill uses flash_attn_func (no flash_attn_with_kvcache exists)
- Apply the same correction to the backend bullets in internals.md and cuda_kernels.md
- Rename the stale fp8_mma_test.cu reference to fp8_test.cu in cuda_kernels.md