Ship exact Whisper GPU acceleration on Linux

[vriesd]

Summary

• select packaged Whisper Vulkan only after exact admission and a live model-free receipt preflight
• preserve VAD and pinned-language, empty-prompt policy across acceleration and one managed CPU recovery
• quarantine only the failing identity, including a process-local latch when persistence fails
• promote separately qualified Debian and RPM ELF variants without rebuilding them
• prepare Echo 0.12.0 release metadata and auditable QA evidence

Verified on the current head

• frontend build, lint, 94 Vitest tests, and light/dark responsive Playwright
• workspace all-target clippy
• full workspace rerun: 180 Echo tests, 52 core tests, 25 desktop tests, and every active integration passed
• two scheduler-sensitive 500 ms tests passed three isolated retries before the clean full rerun
• benchmark, corpus, acceleration, runtime archive, transcription CLI, readiness, fixed-toggle, and recording-limit scripts
• promotion, Tauri marker, and qualified release staging self-tests with Ruff green
• model-free probe SHA 3948213f reproduced the admitted Intel receipt against the original qualified runtime libraries
• four-model interrogate review completed; every accepted finding was fixed

Review feedback closed

• replayed decision and analyzer gates must remain identical
• promotion inputs must match the exact selected cache cycle, runtime, model, VAD, and ICD
• final sweeps now require the same active VAD on every row

Required after merge before v0.12.0

• build the exact clean main executable with ECHO_BUILD_COMMIT
• derive and run the 560-measurement VAD-active qualification for both Debian and RPM ELF variants
• promote both admissions, stage and extract both packages, and upload the commit-specific draft
• merge only green PR checks, then verify main, the tag workflow, the published release, and qualified-release.json

Ordinary packages remain explicitly CPU-only until the external qualified admission exists.

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

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[vriesd]

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[chatgpt-codex-connector]

💡 Codex Review

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Reviewed commit: c4eb1464fe

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