CP HiCache now keeps radix and scheduler-visible lengths as valid tokens while host/device transfers reserve and replay the padded physical page span. Exact valid-tail write, insertion, and match paths no longer fall back to page-flooring; the physical owner-lane contract still uses padded page metadata.
Constraint: Scheduler prefix indices must never include padded tail locs.
Constraint: Host/device transfer and owner-lane admission remain page-based.
Rejected: Pad to cp_size or 2*cp_size pages | wastes KV and recreates short-tail fallback behavior.
Rejected: Expose padded locs through load_cp return | would leak fake tokens into req.prefix_indices.
Confidence: medium
Scope-risk: moderate
Directive: Do not implement split-inside-tail by duplicating page_owners without a page-sharing/refcount design.
Tested: local py_compile for touched CP HiCache/radix/controller files and tests.
Tested: remote g0034 CP HiCache impacted suites: 143 passed, 5 warnings.
Tested: remote g0034 CP shared KV C1-C5 suite: 122 passed, 5 warnings.
Not-tested: full local pytest, blocked by missing runtime dependencies such as orjson/starlette.
Not-tested: CUDA E2E runtime for this commit.
Co-authored-by: OmX <omx@oh-my-codex.dev>
7cfc3c1324