CP HiCache owns KV at page granularity, but exact valid-tail extension and backed partial-tail split could leave an old sub-page tail child beside a new suffix that reuses the same physical page. That makes radix residency ambiguous across device, host, and draft mirrors. The insert/match split paths now prune stale floored tails when safe, and defer/fail through the existing pending-split path when the subtree is protected or has in-flight backup state.\n\nThis also keeps a temporary scheduler boundary warning for externally observed zero-output responses so future ETE runs can classify whether zero visible output reaches SGLang's output processor.\n\nConstraint: CP shared KV and HiCache manage physical KV by page, while radix keys retain valid-token lengths.\nRejected: Keep overlapping old tail nodes after page-floor split | leaves two independent cache states for one physical tail page.\nRejected: Force-prune protected or in-flight backup tails | can mutate cache state still used by active transfer or inference.\nConfidence: medium\nScope-risk: moderate\nDirective: Do not remove the stale-tail prune without replacing it with another page-granular ownership rule for CP HiCache radix splits.\nTested: Remote py_compile for hiradix_cache.py and scheduler_output_processor_mixin.py in g0034 container.\nTested: Remote PYTHONPATH=python python -m pytest -q test/registered/unit/mem_cache/test_cp_hicache_metadata.py -> 97 passed, 5 warnings.\nNot-tested: Full ETE recovery of EAGLE accept length; latest ETE still shows accept collapse, documented in C55.\nNot-tested: Router/client-side output_len=0 correlation when server-side OUTPUT_ZERO_DEBUG does not fire.
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