Last missing core piece of KB phase 4: kb-query no longer hard-fails /search
when Ollama@SOLARIA is unreachable. app/fallback.py implements the plan's
circuit-breaker exactly (30s cached health probe, 3s hard embed timeout on
SOLARIA, one-shot same-request switch to a new local ollama-piha@PIHA
container on timeout/error). sol_status in /healthz and /search now reflects
the real breaker state instead of a hardcoded "up".
New services/ollama-piha (bge-m3, OLLAMA_KEEP_ALIVE=0, arm64/no-GPU) is the
local fallback leg. Live calibration on PIHA (2026-07-27, normal load):
embed latency 4.2-5.2s, RAM peak ~983MiB against a 2.5GiB ceiling -- both
inside the plan's go-bar, so the fallback is enabled by default rather than
gated behind a flag. Calibration also surfaced and disabled (not removed) a
previously-undocumented orphaned native ollama.service on PIHA that had been
conflicting with the container's port.
The embed-model invariant (query embedding == document_chunk.model) still
enforces once at startup, since both fallback legs share one EMBED_MODEL
constant by construction; a redundant per-request DB check was deliberately
skipped and the invariant is instead proven structurally by test.
retrieval_eval.py gains --transport http (plan §2 decision 6/§9), previously
unimplemented. Verified live: HTTP transport is bit-identical to direct
transport against the same live SOLARIA (0 mismatches), and a live sol-down
simulation (kb-query's own OLLAMA_URL pointed at a dead address, no other
Ollama consumer touched) shows the PIHA fallback answering with the same
hit@3 gate outcome and dist within ~3e-4 of the SOLARIA baseline.
Zero changes to DB schema or kb_retrieval's retrieval logic -- only the
embed + health layer, per task constraints.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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