Release Notes

Atlas's release notes are per-version markdown files in docs/releases/. This chapter links to them and summarises the big themes across recent alphas. For the latest release, check the repo — this page is a stable pointer, not a ticker.

Release naming

alpha-<major>.<minor><letter> — e.g. alpha-2.43, alpha-2.44, alpha-2.14c. Minor versions bump on any meaningful feature or fix; letters (a, b, c) are patch-level iterations on the same minor.

Since Atlas is pre-1.0 and under aggressive development, semantic versioning does not apply. Any release can break API or CLI compatibility — the per-release notes document what.

Where to read them

The multi-model Docker image always tracks the latest alpha at avarok/atlas-gb10:latest. Specific versions are tagged as avarok/atlas-gb10:alpha-2.44 etc.

Recent themes

Rather than duplicate every release note, here's the shape of recent work. Each theme maps to architecture decision records under docs/adr/ and the benchmark history in docs/ATLAS_SPARK_JOURNEY.md.

alpha-2.0 → alpha-2.20 — coherence and the model matrix

The long effort to get the full 12-model matrix to pass an end-to-end coherence suite. Highlights:

• Fast safetensors loader (InstantTensor-style, O_DIRECT + pipelined).
• MTP speculative decoding landed for Qwen3.5-35B, Qwen3-Next-80B, Qwen3.5-122B.
• RadixAttention prefix caching + Marconi SSM snapshot caching.
• Qwen3-VL vision tower integration (ViT block + merger layer + MRoPE image position IDs).
• Nemotron-H Mamba-2 integration.
• Chunked SSM prefill (saves 7–9 GB for long-context prefill).

alpha-2.20 → alpha-2.35 — MiniMax and the 256-expert problem

Getting MiniMax-M2 and M2.7 to pass:

• 256-expert sigmoid MoE routing (distinct from softmax-topk).
• EP=2 token dispatch kernel for >256 experts.
• rms_norm placement fix in the MiniMax MoE path.
• norm_topk_prob semantics (sum-normalised, not softmax).
• FP8-free enforcement on NVFP4 shared-expert path.
• Template-forced thinking detection that distinguishes MiniMax-style <think> seeding from Qwen-style.

alpha-2.35 was the first release where M2.7-NVFP4 EP=2 passed the full coherence + tool-call + TPS suite.

alpha-2.35 → alpha-2.44 — OSS prep + bug sweeps

Thirteen waves of systematic audit-framework bug sweeps (project_bug_sweep_wave1_2026_04_22.md through wave13). Net effect:

• Wave 1 — attention/SSM sibling stride bugs (K≠2 paths), slot-keyed CUDA graph caches, compact_sequence pointer leak.
• Wave 5 — Responses flat-form tools, vision prefix-cache contamination skip, EP=2 MTP guard.
• Wave 6 — NVFP4 MTP loader force-BF16 when ignore_modules lists mtp.*, FP8 prefill shared-experts allreduce reorder.
• Wave 7 — SSM dummy slot defensive fix, qwen3 parser literal-</tool_call> + missing-</parameter> recovery.
• Wave 8 — Sampler temperature=0 && rep_penalty=0 div-by-zero guards, longest-first stop-sequence matching.
• Wave 9 — Rate-limiter MAX_KEYS DoS guard, body-size env-configurable.
• Wave 10 — Responses function_call(_output) items + instructions stacking, multi-block reasoning extractor, MoE topk bounds, weight loader scale=0 guard.
• Wave 11 — Streaming Responses store tool_calls, balanced markdown URL parens (Wikipedia URLs), self-spec rollback fail-fast on SSM.
• Wave 12 — Anthropic streaming stop_sequence populated, /tokenize+/detokenize gated behind auth (then ATLAS_REQUIRE_AUTH; the env var has since been replaced by the --require-auth flag).

Vision fixes (7 ViT + MRoPE image position IDs) landed all four vision models passing the Mona-Lisa test.

Pass-N passes

Alongside the bug sweeps, "Pass-N" work is the systematic model-matrix regression suite. Each Pass runs the full 171-test suite across all models and all flag combinations. Milestones:

• Pass-14 — 152/171 (88.9%), 10/19 perfect. 14 fixes delivered.
• Pass-16 — 233/247 (94.3%), 15/19 perfect. Fixed the 80B-MTP seq_len += k-1 off-by-one bootstrap.
• Pass-21 — 233/247, 14/19. Tool-parser +4; 122B-nvfp4 LC regressed from minimax-m2 branch commits.
• Pass-22 — 237/247 (96.0%), 15/19 perfect. HARDWARE.toml SSOT + workspace lints + Cluster B error propagation.

What's next

OSS release prep (alpha-2.43-share) was the major non-code milestone: archive tags, docs cleanup, atlas-internal/ separation for proprietary artefacts.

For the current roadmap, check the repo's pinned issues and the authoritative decision records at docs/adr/.