Concepts

How hal0 thinks. These pages explain the moving parts — what a slot is, how capabilities route requests, where memory lives — so the guides read as applications of a model you already hold, not incantations.

00ArchitectureHow hal0 fits together — the FastAPI control plane, podman-backed inference slots, the dispatcher that routes each request, and the dashboard front end.concepts/architecture.mdx01SlotsA slot is one model served by one podman container. Learn the lifecycle state machine, the write-boundary partition between slot and model, single-flight dispatch, and the GPU arbiter.concepts/slots.mdx02Capabilities & profilesHow hal0 separates what a slot does (capabilities), how it's tuned (profiles), and where it runs (the slot's own hardware grid) — and why that last split changed in v1.0.concepts/capabilities-and-profiles.mdx03StacksA stack is a named, portable bundle of slot assignments plus the profiles and models they reference — apply one to load, swap, and unload a whole slot lineup as a single declarative unit. hal0's youngest major subsystem — solid, but still hardening.concepts/stacks.mdx04Strix HaloAMD Ryzen AI Max+ ("Strix Halo") — hal0's reference platform. Radeon iGPU, XDNA NPU, and a shared GTT unified memory pool that is the central tuning target.concepts/strix-halo.mdx05Memoryhal0's memory subsystem — a Hindsight-backed brain that operators and agents share. Gated by [memory].enabled in hal0.toml (on by default on a fresh install) and degrades cleanly to a no-op when off.concepts/memory.mdx06Agentshal0's agent model: Hermes runs as the sandboxed bundled agent, shaped by personas and a policy-layer MCP client, with the hal0-brain steward driving hal0's own admin tools, an approval queue, and per-persona spending budgets.concepts/agents.mdx07Security posturehal0 ships open on your LAN by default, but v1.0 adds a real, opt-in three-tier auth layer plus a deny-by-default route classification ratchet. Learn the threat model, the auth tiers, and the reverse-proxy pattern.concepts/security.mdx