[ronenkat]

The M2N connector accepted only placements whose NVLink domains held FFN-first, contiguous blocks of the role world, so pods that each hold FFN and Attention ranks (2 x 4A1F) were rejected.

The handshake now plans a transport order from the ranks' NVLink domains: domain by domain, FFN ranks first in each. When the FFN ranks fill the first domains the order is the role world and nothing changes. When every domain holds the same number of FFN ranks, the lanes use a gloo group in transport order and afdEP-comm's per-domain mode (ffn_ranks_per_domain). The role world still drives the handshake, model checks, control plane and expert ownership.

• layout.py: RankPlacement, TransportLayout, plan_transport_layout
• connector.py: transport layout in HandshakeResult, transport group, ffn_ranks_per_domain on each lane, network plan in transport order
• pin afdEP-comm to the ffn-domains-hybrid head (fdff967)
• recipe: Qwen3-235B-A22B-FP8 2 x 4A1F multi-pod recipe
• E2E: Qwen3 multi-pod 1A1F,1A1F M2N eager/graph/DBO cases
• docs and deploy-afd-k8s skill: placement rule, POD=AFD_

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