Phase 4 is now documented as the page-aligned CP split step, leaving the existing shared KV layout untouched while establishing the page ownership invariant needed for direct writes. Phase 5 is documented as the follow-up compute-owner layout change that can route local MLA KV and NSA index writes into the owning rank's physical pool.
Constraint: Current Phase 2/3 layout is page-interleaved and still relies on compatibility materialize paths.
Rejected: Combine split alignment, allocator changes, and shard-aware attention into one phase | too broad to debug safely.
Confidence: high
Scope-risk: narrow
Directive: Do not start compute-owner KV layout work before preserving the Phase 4 page-aligned split invariant and fallback semantics.
Tested: git diff --cached --check
Not-tested: Runtime server startup; documentation-only commit.
d31535589b