Skip to content

alesha-pro/llama.cpp

 
 

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 

History

9,371 Commits
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

DeepSeek-V4-Flash 284B on 4x RTX 3090, 128-256K context (ds4-longctx)

This branch runs the full DeepSeek-V4-Flash 284B MoE (2-bit expert GGUF, 87 GB) on four RTX 3090s: 96 GB of VRAM total, sm_86, no FP8, PCIe only. It builds on cchuter's V4 CUDA port. Every change sits behind a DSV4_* environment variable; with the flags unset the code paths are stock.

Measured on this box (IQ2_XXS/Q2_K experts, Q8_0 attention, imatrix; 220 W per GPU):

what number
prefill at 97K prompt 436 t/s
full 253K prompt 18.4 min (ctx 262144)
needle retrieval from 200K depth pass
decode, short context, MTP on 37 t/s (34 without MTP)
decode at 200K depth 12.3 t/s

What is in the branch

  • Sparse top-k FlashAttention for the CSA prompt chunks (DSV4_SPARSE_FA): the FA kernel gathers only the 512 KV positions the lightning indexer selected, with cp.async loads on full tiles and per-Q-tile union lists (DSV4_FA_UNION).
  • MoE MMQ tile fix (DSV4_MOE_TILE): the ids path sized tiles for the worst-case column bound, which wasted 87% of the MACs at ubatch 512. Sizing from the actual per-expert token count gave +19% end to end. Related finding: IQ2_XXS runs 1.74x faster than Q2_K in MMQ on Ampere.
  • Lightning indexer variants: causal skip (DSV4_IDX_SKIP), a q-tiled WMMA kernel for 200K+ depths (DSV4_IDX_QTILE).
  • Constant-shape decode graphs (DSV4_CONSTANT_SHAPE): depth-bucketed shapes so CUDA graphs replay instead of rebuilding every token.
  • MTP speculative decoding, K=1, end to end: the MTP head is side-loaded from a separate GGUF (DSV4_MTP_GGUF), drafts are computed inside the main graph, and llama-server picks them up via --spec-type dsv4-mtp. Accept rate is 85-100% on greedy decoding.
  • Tool-call fixes for agent clients: the DSML parser now accepts tool parameters in any order. Before this, a well-formed call failed to parse whenever the model ordered parameters differently from the JSON schema, so clients such as opencode never executed the tool.

Production launch

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1,2,3 DSV4_CONSTANT_SHAPE=1 DSV4_SPARSE_FA=1 \
DSV4_IDX_SKIP=1 DSV4_FA_UNION=1 DSV4_MOE_TILE=1 \
DSV4_MTP_SPEC=1 DSV4_MTP_GGUF=/path/to/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-MTP-Q4K-Q8_0-F32.gguf \
./llama-server -m DeepSeek-V4-Flash-IQ2XXS-...-imatrix.gguf \
  -ngl 999 --split-mode layer --flash-attn on --no-repack \
  --ctx-size 131072 --batch-size 4096 --ubatch-size 512 \
  -ts 1,1,1,0.85 --spec-type dsv4-mtp --parallel 1 \
  --jinja --reasoning on --reasoning-format deepseek --reasoning-budget 2048

Notes: tested only on Ampere (CUDA 12.6). -ts 1,1,1,0.85 frees room on the last GPU for the MTP weights. Agent clients should send temperature: 0; sampling at 0.7 on 2-bit weights measurably degrades tool selection, and greedy decoding also keeps the MTP draft gate open.

I post benchmarks from this rig on X: @superalesha.


Original llama.cpp README below.

llama.cpp

llama

License: MIT Release Server

Manifesto / ggml / ops

LLM inference in C/C++

Recent API changes

Hot topics


Quick start

Getting started with llama.cpp is straightforward. Here are several ways to install it on your machine:

Once installed, you'll need a model to work with. Head to the Obtaining and quantizing models section to learn more.

Example command:

# Use a local model file
llama-cli -m my_model.gguf

# Or download and run a model directly from Hugging Face
llama-cli -hf ggml-org/gemma-3-1b-it-GGUF

# Launch OpenAI-compatible API server
llama-server -hf ggml-org/gemma-3-1b-it-GGUF

Description

The main goal of llama.cpp is to enable LLM inference with minimal setup and state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of hardware - locally and in the cloud.

  • Plain C/C++ implementation without any dependencies
  • Apple silicon is a first-class citizen - optimized via ARM NEON, Accelerate and Metal frameworks
  • AVX, AVX2, AVX512 and AMX support for x86 architectures
  • RVV, ZVFH, ZFH, ZICBOP and ZIHINTPAUSE support for RISC-V architectures
  • 1.5-bit, 2-bit, 3-bit, 4-bit, 5-bit, 6-bit, and 8-bit integer quantization for faster inference and reduced memory use
  • Custom CUDA kernels for running LLMs on NVIDIA GPUs (support for AMD GPUs via HIP and Moore Threads GPUs via MUSA)
  • Vulkan and SYCL backend support
  • CPU+GPU hybrid inference to partially accelerate models larger than the total VRAM capacity

The llama.cpp project is the main playground for developing new features for the ggml library.

Models

Typically finetunes of the base models below are supported as well.

Instructions for adding support for new models: HOWTO-add-model.md

Text-only

Multimodal

Bindings
UIs

(to have a project listed here, it should clearly state that it depends on llama.cpp)

Tools
  • akx/ggify – download PyTorch models from Hugging Face Hub and convert them to GGML
  • akx/ollama-dl – download models from the Ollama library to be used directly with llama.cpp
  • crashr/gppm – launch llama.cpp instances utilizing NVIDIA Tesla P40 or P100 GPUs with reduced idle power consumption
  • gpustack/gguf-parser - review/check the GGUF file and estimate the memory usage
  • Styled Lines (proprietary licensed, async wrapper of inference part for game development in Unity3d with pre-built Mobile and Web platform wrappers and a model example)
  • unslothai/unsloth – 🦥 exports/saves fine-tuned and trained models to GGUF (Apache-2.0)
Infrastructure
  • Paddler - Open-source LLMOps platform for hosting and scaling AI in your own infrastructure
  • GPUStack - Manage GPU clusters for running LLMs
  • llama_cpp_canister - llama.cpp as a smart contract on the Internet Computer, using WebAssembly
  • llama-swap - transparent proxy that adds automatic model switching with llama-server
  • Kalavai - Crowdsource end to end LLM deployment at any scale
  • llmaz - ☸️ Easy, advanced inference platform for large language models on Kubernetes.
  • LLMKube - Kubernetes operator for llama.cpp with multi-GPU and Apple Silicon Metal support"
Games
  • Lucy's Labyrinth - A simple maze game where agents controlled by an AI model will try to trick you.

Supported backends

Backend Target devices
Metal Apple Silicon
BLAS All
BLIS All
SYCL Intel and Nvidia GPU
OpenVINO [In Progress] Intel CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs
MUSA Moore Threads GPU
CUDA Nvidia GPU
HIP AMD GPU
ZenDNN AMD CPU
Vulkan GPU
CANN Ascend NPU
OpenCL Adreno GPU
IBM zDNN IBM Z & LinuxONE
WebGPU [In Progress] All
RPC All
Hexagon [In Progress] Snapdragon
VirtGPU VirtGPU APIR

Obtaining and quantizing models

The Hugging Face platform hosts a number of LLMs compatible with llama.cpp:

You can either manually download the GGUF file or directly use any llama.cpp-compatible models from Hugging Face or other model hosting sites, by using this CLI argument: -hf <user>/<model>[:quant]. For example:

llama-cli -hf ggml-org/gemma-3-1b-it-GGUF

By default, the CLI would download from Hugging Face, you can switch to other options with the environment variable MODEL_ENDPOINT. The MODEL_ENDPOINT must point to a Hugging Face compatible API endpoint.

After downloading a model, use the CLI tools to run it locally - see below.

llama.cpp requires the model to be stored in the GGUF file format. Models in other data formats can be converted to GGUF using the convert_*.py Python scripts in this repo.

The Hugging Face platform provides a variety of online tools for converting, quantizing and hosting models with llama.cpp:

To learn more about model quantization, read this documentation

A CLI tool for accessing and experimenting with most of llama.cpp's functionality.

  • Run in conversation mode

    Models with a built-in chat template will automatically activate conversation mode. If this doesn't occur, you can manually enable it by adding -cnv and specifying a suitable chat template with --chat-template NAME

    llama-cli -m model.gguf
    
    # > hi, who are you?
    # Hi there! I'm your helpful assistant! I'm an AI-powered chatbot designed to assist and provide information to users like you. I'm here to help answer your questions, provide guidance, and offer support on a wide range of topics. I'm a friendly and knowledgeable AI, and I'm always happy to help with anything you need. What's on your mind, and how can I assist you today?
    #
    # > what is 1+1?
    # Easy peasy! The answer to 1+1 is... 2!
  • Run in conversation mode with custom chat template
    # use the "chatml" template (use -h to see the list of supported templates)
    llama-cli -m model.gguf -cnv --chat-template chatml
    
    # use a custom template
    llama-cli -m model.gguf -cnv --in-prefix 'User: ' --reverse-prompt 'User:'
  • Constrain the output with a custom grammar
    llama-cli -m model.gguf -n 256 --grammar-file grammars/json.gbnf -p 'Request: schedule a call at 8pm; Command:'
    
    # {"appointmentTime": "8pm", "appointmentDetails": "schedule a a call"}

    The grammars/ folder contains a handful of sample grammars. To write your own, check out the GBNF Guide.

    For authoring more complex JSON grammars, check out https://grammar.intrinsiclabs.ai/

A lightweight, OpenAI API compatible, HTTP server for serving LLMs.

  • Start a local HTTP server with default configuration on port 8080
    llama-server -m model.gguf --port 8080
    
    # Basic web UI can be accessed via browser: http://localhost:8080
    # Chat completion endpoint: http://localhost:8080/v1/chat/completions
  • Support multiple-users and parallel decoding
    # up to 4 concurrent requests, each with 4096 max context
    llama-server -m model.gguf -c 16384 -np 4
  • Enable speculative decoding
    # the draft.gguf model should be a small variant of the target model.gguf
    llama-server -m model.gguf -md draft.gguf
  • Serve an embedding model
    # use the /embedding endpoint
    llama-server -m model.gguf --embedding --pooling cls -ub 8192
  • Serve a reranking model
    # use the /reranking endpoint
    llama-server -m model.gguf --reranking
  • Constrain all outputs with a grammar
    # custom grammar
    llama-server -m model.gguf --grammar-file grammar.gbnf
    
    # JSON
    llama-server -m model.gguf --grammar-file grammars/json.gbnf

A tool for measuring the perplexity 1 (and other quality metrics) of a model over a given text.

  • Measure the perplexity over a text file
    llama-perplexity -m model.gguf -f file.txt
    
    # [1]15.2701,[2]5.4007,[3]5.3073,[4]6.2965,[5]5.8940,[6]5.6096,[7]5.7942,[8]4.9297, ...
    # Final estimate: PPL = 5.4007 +/- 0.67339
  • Measure KL divergence
    # TODO

Benchmark the performance of the inference for various parameters.

  • Run default benchmark
    llama-bench -m model.gguf
    
    # Output:
    # | model               |       size |     params | backend    | threads |          test |                  t/s |
    # | ------------------- | ---------: | ---------: | ---------- | ------: | ------------: | -------------------: |
    # | qwen2 1.5B Q4_0     | 885.97 MiB |     1.54 B | Metal,BLAS |      16 |         pp512 |      5765.41 ± 20.55 |
    # | qwen2 1.5B Q4_0     | 885.97 MiB |     1.54 B | Metal,BLAS |      16 |         tg128 |        197.71 ± 0.81 |
    #
    # build: 3e0ba0e60 (4229)

A minimal example for implementing apps with llama.cpp. Useful for developers.

  • Basic text completion
    llama-simple -m model.gguf
    
    # Hello my name is Kaitlyn and I am a 16 year old girl. I am a junior in high school and I am currently taking a class called "The Art of

Contributing

  • Contributors can open PRs
  • Collaborators will be invited based on contributions
  • Maintainers can push to branches in the llama.cpp repo and merge PRs into the master branch
  • Any help with managing issues, PRs and projects is very appreciated!
  • See good first issues for tasks suitable for first contributions
  • Read the CONTRIBUTING.md for more information
  • Make sure to read this: Inference at the edge
  • A bit of backstory for those who are interested: Changelog podcast

Other documentation

Development documentation

Seminal papers and background on the models

If your issue is with model generation quality, then please at least scan the following links and papers to understand the limitations of LLaMA models. This is especially important when choosing an appropriate model size and appreciating both the significant and subtle differences between LLaMA models and ChatGPT:

XCFramework

The XCFramework is a precompiled version of the library for iOS, visionOS, tvOS, and macOS. It can be used in Swift projects without the need to compile the library from source. For example:

// swift-tools-version: 5.10
// The swift-tools-version declares the minimum version of Swift required to build this package.

import PackageDescription

let package = Package(
    name: "MyLlamaPackage",
    targets: [
        .executableTarget(
            name: "MyLlamaPackage",
            dependencies: [
                "LlamaFramework"
            ]),
        .binaryTarget(
            name: "LlamaFramework",
            url: "https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/releases/download/b5046/llama-b5046-xcframework.zip",
            checksum: "c19be78b5f00d8d29a25da41042cb7afa094cbf6280a225abe614b03b20029ab"
        )
    ]
)

The above example is using an intermediate build b5046 of the library. This can be modified to use a different version by changing the URL and checksum.

Completions

Command-line completion is available for some environments.

Bash Completion

$ build/bin/llama-cli --completion-bash > ~/.llama-completion.bash
$ source ~/.llama-completion.bash

Optionally this can be added to your .bashrc or .bash_profile to load it automatically. For example:

$ echo "source ~/.llama-completion.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

Dependencies

  • yhirose/cpp-httplib - Single-header HTTP server, used by llama-server - MIT license
  • stb-image - Single-header image format decoder, used by multimodal subsystem - Public domain
  • nlohmann/json - Single-header JSON library, used by various tools/examples - MIT License
  • miniaudio.h - Single-header audio format decoder, used by multimodal subsystem - Public domain
  • subprocess.h - Single-header process launching solution for C and C++ - Public domain

Footnotes

  1. https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/perplexity

About

LLM inference in C/C++

Resources

License

Contributing

Security policy

Stars

40 stars

Watchers

0 watching

Forks

Packages

 
 
 

Contributors

Languages

  • C++ 56.7%
  • C 13.1%
  • Python 7.7%
  • Cuda 6.3%
  • TypeScript 3.1%
  • HTML 2.9%
  • Other 10.2%