Old news by now, but you might not be aware that llama-server can do multi-model for a while now,
Meaning that you (and by that I mean your AI agent that has read the llama.cpp code) can write an ini file pointing to your models with parameters optimized for the specific model on your specific hardware. (Optimized by you through testing. Not that AI)
Then, any api client can just select a model and the system does the right thing.
It's great software. It just works.
__
You just need to ignore the cargo culting commandline options on social media.
But you should be listening to the devs.
Have you already enabled ngram-mod (or rather just spec-default)? It is practically free.
Not sure why it's on the front page now, but I highly recommend using llama.cpp for running AI model locally vs using other inference framework, unless you have a very specific requirement.
ggerganov and the team have done a stellar job maintaining the quality while still being fast to implement new models/improvements.
At this point the options are llama-server or vLLM if you're serious about running things at your desk in the under 256GB RAM size class (70B, 120B size models). In addition to, of course, 27B to 35B size things. With of course a ton of compile time build customization options for whatever specific hardware platform you want to run either llama or vllm on.
The gap was MUCH larger in the past, but in my tests, oMLX and llama.cpp are now very similar (within 10%) in both prompt processing and generation speed. GGUF ecosystem provides a better selection of quants, in my experience Unsloth ones are excellent.
possibly hitting front page because this website is fairly new? For me, it's certainly the first time I've seen a one-liner curl|bash installer for llama.cpp, which was basically the only reason to use ollama.
llama.cpp works pretty well for me on the Framework 13 laptop, but the current era of "move fast, break things, rarely fix" (sorry, that's how it feels), bites here quite a bit.
Two examples:
- https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/25863 Someone's few lines change broke the native (ROCm) support for the AMD GPU inside Framework (and other integrated systems), and any rollback or proper fix is pending for almost a month. Fortunately there's workaround (switching to Vulkan rather than ROCm devices), but both the way the bug was introduced and the way it is not fixed just doesn't give much confidencen
- LM Studio is using llama.cpp internally for GGUF, they ship their own build with their closed source system as "runtimes". Their ROCm runtime does not enable the the AMD GPU inside the Framework, even thought the llama.cpp version would support it. So their runtime keeps telling me that there's no supported AMD GPU -- again, the solution is to use the GPU with the Vulkan devices. Not fixed since Jan at least https://github.com/lmstudio-ai/lmstudio-bug-tracker/issues/1...
I guess overall it's the worst runtime I've seen so far, except for all the other runtimes out there... I'm a fan, though in some cases I don't have enough knowledge, or I don't have access to fix things, and that feels like a bummer...
I just switched to Vulkan, and be done with it. :)
As much as I can tell, the ROCm version of llama.cpp would be a bit faster on prompt processing, but about the same on the token generation as Vulkan. Real life benchmarks don't seem to give any "ROCm or nothing" sort of vibes. And the difference between the performance of different models are way bigger than the difference between the llama.cpp versions (and versus different runtimes like the llama.cpp/GGUF and the MLX runtimes on Mac for the same models)...
I've tinkered enough with the serving, that I'd rather do something with them with, say 10% slower speed, than spending hours on seting things up again... YMMV
The first one multiple contributors highlighted the PR as urgent andits had lots of review but it appears to be waiting for another review and/or someone that owns the affected hardware to test that the PR fixes the issue, it wpuld be easy for you to test and report whether or not it does, and the second thing is not related to llama.cpp at all
Yes ideally there would be testing every hardware + software combo but this costs engineering time and $$$ money, and you are running on master branch, no master branch of any software is stable, inherently, if you run into issues, just stick to the old hash where stuff worked, why are you insistent on both being at the bleeding edge and experience 0 breakage!
The second I didn't say it's any of llama.cpp's "fault", but it is _related_ to llama.cpp since it's being shipped in another system, aye?
Can't stick to the old hash either, because older version have different bugs. E.g. on older versions the same Qwen3.6 model reliably fails to call specific tools due to template issues, while just having the newer llama.cpp version has that fixed. So different versions - different bugs, rather than no bugs.
Yesterday I installed llama.cpp to test it with local AI Data Analyst that I'm building. I was also testing other open LLM providers: Ollama, Jan, vLLM, LM Studio. I had older NVIDIA card (RTX 3070) and llama.cpp instalation was smooth, contrary to vLLM which required me to reinstall CUDA drivers because by default it installed the latest one. I'm curious if there is a speed difference between the same open LLM model served with different runners.
Anything that suggests curl into bash just plain sketches me out. (edit: I know, this isn't totally rational, it just seems weird to me. We download and trust a lot of software and run code from a bunch of package repositories as a regular activity...).
It's more about installation location for me. For these types of projects, I don't even install it. I just clone, build and run from there. I have no idea where the bash script is going to put things.
Package management provides cryptographic attestation over the entire process, including the scripts run. Nothing is arbitrary nor mutable in the default state. The files touched will be in a predictable place and the scope of privilege escalation is clearly defined.
I mean it's probably not, I just haven't got used to it yet. It's about the same level of security as installing a windows app on win2000 25 years ago and blindly downloading a .exe off the internet and running it to get into the install wizard. But indeed I also kind of blindly trust that whatever I'm getting from the debian trixie officially gpg-signed packages isn't backdoored.
One thing I do not do as a matter of practice is install things with a ridiculous number of recursive npm dependencies.
> Anything that suggests curl into bash just plain sketches me out.
Yeah, 100% and it's becoming more and more of a thing, see rust install for example.
OTOH, if you're installing llama.cpp, you're more than likely planning to run an LLM on your Linux box with an agentic harness, so a curl into bash thing might be the least of your security concerns, :-)
Yeah I recently tried the coding harness that's recommended here, Pi, in a bubble wrap sandbox and was horrified to learn that it spams multiple warnings at you if you don't give it write access to its own config/extension folder... Everyone else is rawdogging it I guess.
I think the best course is a docker container or a VM, i agree with the sentiment but trying to restrict the permissions of these things is fighting an uphill battle, it’s probably best to let them reign king in a disposable and isolated environment
One way I prevent possible catastrophic fuckups is that the 'doing code work' box that runs opencode or pi or whatever, is its entirely own separate VM and desktop environment (running as a xen or kvm guest and with its own LVM logical volume as boot/root and /home disk), than the machine running llama-server itself.
The harness gets the openai-compatible endpoint fed into it to talk to llama-server across the network, but the VM has no access whatsoever to my personal files, mail, backups/deep storage, fileserver, Documents folder, etc.
It's okay-ish for Rust because you only need the curl|bash for Rustup, which is meant as a development environment. On production you can, for example, use APT to download it from Debian.
What would you win? Cmake is capable of executing shell commands and you end up with a binary that will execute on your machine anyway. At the end of the day it is just a matter of trust anyway, isn't it? I personally use bwrap if I'm not confident about the source.
Cloning a repo and building it is not _that_ hard, but easy installation is often the thing that makes or breaks a product. I believe Ollama proves that point in this context.
Mostly agree but at least with git clone you have a hash and the malicious code has to be served to everyone, and GitHub is less likely to get hijacked by a malicious third party.
But yes, still trusting the project with arbitrary code execution on your machine, including build formulas that pull stuff from the internet and suffer from all the above anyways
You're not wrong about the appearance of sketchiness of that, but.... dude, come on. "It's not hard" is only true because you already know how to do it.
If you’re unsure how to do it, you can ask others for help or Claude will tell you.
Point Claude Code at a repository and ask how to install it safely. You don’t have to know about make or cryptography of HTTPS or anything, really. It will walk you through the options and risk.
If you have questions about any part of it—i.e. you don’t recognize an acronym or deeply understand why something works—you can ask.
It's literally three steps, assuming you have the equivalent of the debian "build-essential" dependencies installed on your system for cmake, compiler. It's the exact three rows of my post, pasted one at a time into the CLI. The llama-server build guide page is actually pretty good.
I mean, sure, if there's people who can't figure that out, they're probably better off using a GUI that is a wrapper on top of somebody else's precompiled llama-server, like unsloth studio or lm studio. There's a good sized market for that and I wish them well.
Is llama.cpp (and thus llama.app) really that much better than Ollama? I've Only ever played with Ollama, so geniously curious to hear other's real-world experiences.
I think I can probably run Gemma 3 12B on my macbook M3 pro with 18GB. The question is, should I do it? This small model is probably not capable of doing a lot or advanced coding or reasoning. What else could it be used for, since it can run locally and privately?
I tried to run in on my Arc A770, but all of the binary releases I could find were compiled without OpenVINO support enabled. I tried compiling it myself, but after two days of the compiler running it failed.
It also even easier to get working and integrate into your system in a sustainable manner with NixOS. Do it by hand or throw an LLM at it, it will get you a declarative patch for your NixOS config that brings llama-cpp into your config that you can review and add under version control (no random `make install` build artifacts contaminating your system, no wondering "what was it that I ran? what are all these files? how do I do the same with a newer version?" a couple months later). There's also likely some build cache where Nixoids have already build what you want.
I had a great experience with llama-cpp with Nvidia backend on NixOS.
the full set of llama.cpp binaries builds in under 5 minutes with an unmodified build workflow straight from their github page on a literally ten year old dual xeon.
llama.cpp is like the ffmepg of AI, and one of the reasons I so greatly dislike ollama is that the latter completely obfuscates that they're a rebrand of the former. Georgi Gerganov and team did all the hard work; ollama is langchain-like VC-bait with a HF download wrapper.
It's from https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp -- not associated with Meta, it's been around for years, and surely they know about it -- so I would guess either it's not a trademark violation or they don't care.
It seems that llama.app is a direct competitor to ollama.com
I can understand the desire for the llama.cpp project to want to own the end user relationship, it is true that previous to this they were a tool provider and not really owning the end user experience.
Ollama uses the llama.cpp backend for inference. I find Ollama noticably slower. Llama.cpp has had a built-in webui (used as llama-server) for a long time now so have owned the user experience too.
Old news by now, but you might not be aware that llama-server can do multi-model for a while now,
Meaning that you (and by that I mean your AI agent that has read the llama.cpp code) can write an ini file pointing to your models with parameters optimized for the specific model on your specific hardware. (Optimized by you through testing. Not that AI)
Then, any api client can just select a model and the system does the right thing.
It's great software. It just works.
__
You just need to ignore the cargo culting commandline options on social media. But you should be listening to the devs.
Have you already enabled ngram-mod (or rather just spec-default)? It is practically free.
Not sure why it's on the front page now, but I highly recommend using llama.cpp for running AI model locally vs using other inference framework, unless you have a very specific requirement.
ggerganov and the team have done a stellar job maintaining the quality while still being fast to implement new models/improvements.
At this point the options are llama-server or vLLM if you're serious about running things at your desk in the under 256GB RAM size class (70B, 120B size models). In addition to, of course, 27B to 35B size things. With of course a ton of compile time build customization options for whatever specific hardware platform you want to run either llama or vllm on.
does your comment depend on the OS? I thought MLX has better performance on MacOS than llama.cpp
The gap was MUCH larger in the past, but in my tests, oMLX and llama.cpp are now very similar (within 10%) in both prompt processing and generation speed. GGUF ecosystem provides a better selection of quants, in my experience Unsloth ones are excellent.
possibly hitting front page because this website is fairly new? For me, it's certainly the first time I've seen a one-liner curl|bash installer for llama.cpp, which was basically the only reason to use ollama.
llama.cpp works pretty well for me on the Framework 13 laptop, but the current era of "move fast, break things, rarely fix" (sorry, that's how it feels), bites here quite a bit.
Two examples:
- https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/25863 Someone's few lines change broke the native (ROCm) support for the AMD GPU inside Framework (and other integrated systems), and any rollback or proper fix is pending for almost a month. Fortunately there's workaround (switching to Vulkan rather than ROCm devices), but both the way the bug was introduced and the way it is not fixed just doesn't give much confidencen
- LM Studio is using llama.cpp internally for GGUF, they ship their own build with their closed source system as "runtimes". Their ROCm runtime does not enable the the AMD GPU inside the Framework, even thought the llama.cpp version would support it. So their runtime keeps telling me that there's no supported AMD GPU -- again, the solution is to use the GPU with the Vulkan devices. Not fixed since Jan at least https://github.com/lmstudio-ai/lmstudio-bug-tracker/issues/1...
I guess overall it's the worst runtime I've seen so far, except for all the other runtimes out there... I'm a fan, though in some cases I don't have enough knowledge, or I don't have access to fix things, and that feels like a bummer...
So are there any alternatives which do actually work well with ROCm OOTB?
I just switched to Vulkan, and be done with it. :)
As much as I can tell, the ROCm version of llama.cpp would be a bit faster on prompt processing, but about the same on the token generation as Vulkan. Real life benchmarks don't seem to give any "ROCm or nothing" sort of vibes. And the difference between the performance of different models are way bigger than the difference between the llama.cpp versions (and versus different runtimes like the llama.cpp/GGUF and the MLX runtimes on Mac for the same models)...
I've tinkered enough with the serving, that I'd rather do something with them with, say 10% slower speed, than spending hours on seting things up again... YMMV
The first one multiple contributors highlighted the PR as urgent andits had lots of review but it appears to be waiting for another review and/or someone that owns the affected hardware to test that the PR fixes the issue, it wpuld be easy for you to test and report whether or not it does, and the second thing is not related to llama.cpp at all
Yes ideally there would be testing every hardware + software combo but this costs engineering time and $$$ money, and you are running on master branch, no master branch of any software is stable, inherently, if you run into issues, just stick to the old hash where stuff worked, why are you insistent on both being at the bleeding edge and experience 0 breakage!
I did report my test results on the first one. :)
The second I didn't say it's any of llama.cpp's "fault", but it is _related_ to llama.cpp since it's being shipped in another system, aye?
Can't stick to the old hash either, because older version have different bugs. E.g. on older versions the same Qwen3.6 model reliably fails to call specific tools due to template issues, while just having the newer llama.cpp version has that fixed. So different versions - different bugs, rather than no bugs.
Why the beating you are trying to gimme, mate? :)
Yesterday I installed llama.cpp to test it with local AI Data Analyst that I'm building. I was also testing other open LLM providers: Ollama, Jan, vLLM, LM Studio. I had older NVIDIA card (RTX 3070) and llama.cpp instalation was smooth, contrary to vLLM which required me to reinstall CUDA drivers because by default it installed the latest one. I'm curious if there is a speed difference between the same open LLM model served with different runners.
> I had older NVIDIA card (RTX 3070) and llama.cpp instalation was smooth
what model was it that you were able to run with the rtx 3070?
I was a bit suspicious of the url but it is also listed on llama.cpp github
https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp
Same, but it looks legit enough to me. Here is the git repo for the site with a link back to llama.app: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.pages
(I still deeply distrust curlpipes in general though.)
ty for digging this up!
Anything that suggests curl into bash just plain sketches me out. (edit: I know, this isn't totally rational, it just seems weird to me. We download and trust a lot of software and run code from a bunch of package repositories as a regular activity...).
Git clone llama.cpp and build it, it's not hard.
https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/docs/build...
literally just a few steps for the basics:
git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp
cmake -B build
cmake --build build --config Release
There are also prebuilt binary archives for just about any distribution and inference backend for the latest github release:
https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/releases
No need to compile unless you really need to.
This. I use mise's github backend `mise use --global --pin github:ggml-org/llama.cpp` to grab the release binaries for Linux, Windows and macOS.
>Anything that suggests curl into bash just plain sketches me out.
How is it different than trusting any other method of installation? If URL has https and is from an author you trust i dont see the difference.
It's more about installation location for me. For these types of projects, I don't even install it. I just clone, build and run from there. I have no idea where the bash script is going to put things.
Which also makes it not obvious how to uninstall it. pip/npm/cargo etc have well known mechanisms for that.
curl|sh is convenient for container images I guess.
Package management provides cryptographic attestation over the entire process, including the scripts run. Nothing is arbitrary nor mutable in the default state. The files touched will be in a predictable place and the scope of privilege escalation is clearly defined.
But he’s not using a package, he’s downloading from gir repo and build which exactly same getting a bash script from the same repo and executing it.
It’s not. Try pulling updates after a rebase. Very much not the same as piping arbitrary disembodied text into your shell.
>Nothing is arbitrary nor mutable in the default state.
What do you mean with this?
Rendered text cannot be assumed to equal the underlying text, unfortunately
How so? As i understand your point, this would mean we cannot trust GitHub enough to return the same content in git clone vs curl?
As an example, webfonts can make rendered text differ from the underlying text that ends up on your clipboard.
Sure, but doesn't this assume that you cannot the publisher anyway? So why would you not trust their homepage but trust their source-code
Download and inspect it.
I mean it's probably not, I just haven't got used to it yet. It's about the same level of security as installing a windows app on win2000 25 years ago and blindly downloading a .exe off the internet and running it to get into the install wizard. But indeed I also kind of blindly trust that whatever I'm getting from the debian trixie officially gpg-signed packages isn't backdoored.
One thing I do not do as a matter of practice is install things with a ridiculous number of recursive npm dependencies.
The good news is that even if you do not blindly trust anything, downloading binaries from Debian trixie is a lot more safe.
You can also install it through homebrew https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/llama.cpp
> Anything that suggests curl into bash just plain sketches me out.
Yeah, 100% and it's becoming more and more of a thing, see rust install for example.
OTOH, if you're installing llama.cpp, you're more than likely planning to run an LLM on your Linux box with an agentic harness, so a curl into bash thing might be the least of your security concerns, :-)
> security concerns
Yeah I recently tried the coding harness that's recommended here, Pi, in a bubble wrap sandbox and was horrified to learn that it spams multiple warnings at you if you don't give it write access to its own config/extension folder... Everyone else is rawdogging it I guess.
I think the best course is a docker container or a VM, i agree with the sentiment but trying to restrict the permissions of these things is fighting an uphill battle, it’s probably best to let them reign king in a disposable and isolated environment
One way I prevent possible catastrophic fuckups is that the 'doing code work' box that runs opencode or pi or whatever, is its entirely own separate VM and desktop environment (running as a xen or kvm guest and with its own LVM logical volume as boot/root and /home disk), than the machine running llama-server itself.
The harness gets the openai-compatible endpoint fed into it to talk to llama-server across the network, but the VM has no access whatsoever to my personal files, mail, backups/deep storage, fileserver, Documents folder, etc.
It's okay-ish for Rust because you only need the curl|bash for Rustup, which is meant as a development environment. On production you can, for example, use APT to download it from Debian.
Backdoored developers are ok?
What would you win? Cmake is capable of executing shell commands and you end up with a binary that will execute on your machine anyway. At the end of the day it is just a matter of trust anyway, isn't it? I personally use bwrap if I'm not confident about the source.
Cloning a repo and building it is not _that_ hard, but easy installation is often the thing that makes or breaks a product. I believe Ollama proves that point in this context.
Mostly agree but at least with git clone you have a hash and the malicious code has to be served to everyone, and GitHub is less likely to get hijacked by a malicious third party.
But yes, still trusting the project with arbitrary code execution on your machine, including build formulas that pull stuff from the internet and suffer from all the above anyways
You're not wrong about the appearance of sketchiness of that, but.... dude, come on. "It's not hard" is only true because you already know how to do it.
If you’re unsure how to do it, you can ask others for help or Claude will tell you.
Point Claude Code at a repository and ask how to install it safely. You don’t have to know about make or cryptography of HTTPS or anything, really. It will walk you through the options and risk.
If you have questions about any part of it—i.e. you don’t recognize an acronym or deeply understand why something works—you can ask.
Or ask here! HN is filled with smart humans.
It's literally three steps, assuming you have the equivalent of the debian "build-essential" dependencies installed on your system for cmake, compiler. It's the exact three rows of my post, pasted one at a time into the CLI. The llama-server build guide page is actually pretty good.
I mean, sure, if there's people who can't figure that out, they're probably better off using a GUI that is a wrapper on top of somebody else's precompiled llama-server, like unsloth studio or lm studio. There's a good sized market for that and I wish them well.
Is llama.cpp (and thus llama.app) really that much better than Ollama? I've Only ever played with Ollama, so geniously curious to hear other's real-world experiences.
"Friends don't let friends use ollama" https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/
> Is llama.cpp (and thus llama.app)
llama.app is just an URL (for the "advertisement" webpages of llama.cpp outside GitHub).
> that much better than Ollama
llama.cpp is the real thing, ollama was a fork that remained inferior.
ollama uses llama.cpp
I think I can probably run Gemma 3 12B on my macbook M3 pro with 18GB. The question is, should I do it? This small model is probably not capable of doing a lot or advanced coding or reasoning. What else could it be used for, since it can run locally and privately?
This site seems scam for not noting origins of llama.cpp and fails to quickly and clearly communicate it NOT being affiliated with GGML org.
From https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp:
> Visit https://llama.app and follow the instructions
It's linked at the start of the README.
I tried to run in on my Arc A770, but all of the binary releases I could find were compiled without OpenVINO support enabled. I tried compiling it myself, but after two days of the compiler running it failed.
Two days sounds like a lot, both llama.cpp and openvino only takes a few minutes to compile on any decent modern cpu.
It also even easier to get working and integrate into your system in a sustainable manner with NixOS. Do it by hand or throw an LLM at it, it will get you a declarative patch for your NixOS config that brings llama-cpp into your config that you can review and add under version control (no random `make install` build artifacts contaminating your system, no wondering "what was it that I ran? what are all these files? how do I do the same with a newer version?" a couple months later). There's also likely some build cache where Nixoids have already build what you want.
I had a great experience with llama-cpp with Nvidia backend on NixOS.
(Sorry for being that guy.)
the full set of llama.cpp binaries builds in under 5 minutes with an unmodified build workflow straight from their github page on a literally ten year old dual xeon.
I don't know how it works, but does Vulkan not work on Arc?
and? whats the point of this? Doesn't everyone already know about llama.cpp?
llama.cpp is like the ffmepg of AI, and one of the reasons I so greatly dislike ollama is that the latter completely obfuscates that they're a rebrand of the former. Georgi Gerganov and team did all the hard work; ollama is langchain-like VC-bait with a HF download wrapper.
> No telemetry
Must be tough not to be able to monitor your own models!
(The odds that that tagline was AI-generated seem high.)
I'm confused, is this from Meta? There's no attribution anywhere. Surely releasing an AI tool called llama breaks their trademark if not
It's from https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp -- not associated with Meta, it's been around for years, and surely they know about it -- so I would guess either it's not a trademark violation or they don't care.
It seems that llama.app is a direct competitor to ollama.com
I can understand the desire for the llama.cpp project to want to own the end user relationship, it is true that previous to this they were a tool provider and not really owning the end user experience.
And ollama were sketchy about not providing proper credit to llama.cpp, even though that’s all they are, a wrapper for it.
Ollama uses the llama.cpp backend for inference. I find Ollama noticably slower. Llama.cpp has had a built-in webui (used as llama-server) for a long time now so have owned the user experience too.