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NInferEZ Engine discovery contract

NInferEZ and other launchers discover an engine before starting a model. Discovery is host-only: none of these commands initializes CUDA, loads weights or allocates VRAM.

Binary identity

.\ninfer-serve.exe --version-json

The response contains schemaVersion, product, engineVersion, contractVersion, buildId, platform, cudaArchitecture, upstream and unofficialDistribution.

Capabilities

.\ninfer-serve.exe --capabilities-json

The response repeats the identity and declares the artifact container version, supported model families, KV formats, speculative backends, API compatibility and build-specific native weight formats. A client must not infer native NVFP4 support from a GPU name; it must read features.nativeNvfp4Weights.

Clients must reject a higher contractVersion they do not understand. Within a known contract version they must ignore unknown fields, so capabilities can be extended without requiring a manager update.

Artifact inspection

.\ninfer-inspect.exe --model D:\Models\model.ninfer --json --estimate-memory

The inspector validates the NInfer v3 directory and every object range without reading the full weight payload. It returns metadata, provenance, components, encoded sizes, weight formats, speculative-model features and compatibility with the current build. Failures use a stable shape:

{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "contractVersion": 1,
  "valid": false,
  "error": { "code": "artifact_invalid", "message": "human-readable detail" }
}

memoryEstimate.runtimeVramAvailable is intentionally false: exact runtime VRAM also depends on the selected GPU, context capacity, KV format, speculation, concurrency and workspaces. Runtime preflight belongs to a later engine contract and must not be approximated from file size.

Release manifest

Every ZIP contains engine-manifest.json; every GitHub release also carries a small external release-manifest-sm<arch>.json. They identify the architecture, version, upstream commit, Preview/Stable qualification and archive SHA-256. They never execute commands or supply arbitrary environment variables.