`parallel_stage_init` was structurally impossible on a CPU deployment.
`resolve_stage_physical_devices` returns None for `devices: "cpu"`, and the
admission resolver fails closed on None -- correctly, for a GPU replica whose
devices cannot be accounted -- so every CPU pipeline raised
StageAdmissionError and fell back to sequential stage startup. The edge
profile sets parallel_stage_init: true, so that profile was broken on CPU
rather than merely slower.
Measured on Qwen3-TTS 0.6B (Xeon 8480C, 24 threads, init only):
sequential 64.57 s
parallel 30.54 s 2.1x
The fix is not to skip admission. The per-device ledger is vacuous on CPU --
there is no device to overcommit -- but the resource concurrent CPU init
contends for is host memory, and two stages allocating KV caches at once can
exhaust it exactly as two GPU stages exhaust a card. So there is now a host
ledger with the same discipline: sum the declared KV budgets, compare against
available RAM with a margin, refuse to start if it does not fit, and fail
closed on a stage that declares no budget at all. The arithmetic is pure
(`evaluate_host`) so it is testable without a device, matching the existing
design.
Which ledger applies is decided by where the stages are *placed*, not by what
platform the process reports: a first version keyed on
`current_platform.is_cpu()` and broke five existing GPU-path tests, because a
CPU-only test host still has to admit GPU-shaped plans correctly. It now
routes on the replicas' own `devices`.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
