Llama.cpp supports Vulkan. why doesn't Ollama?
234 comments
·January 31, 2025lolinder
chown
I totally agree with this. I wanted to make it really easy for non-technical users with an app that hid all the complexities. I basically just wanted to embed the engine without making users open their terminal, let alone make them configure. I started with llama.cpp amd almost gave up on the idea before I stumbled upon Ollama, which made the app happen[1]
There are many flaws in Ollama but it makes many things much easier esp. if you don’t want to bother building and configuring. They do take a long time to merge any PRs though. One of my PRs has been waiting for 8 months and there was this another PR about KV cache quantization that took them 6 months to merge.
[1]: https://msty.app
zozbot234
> They do take a long time to merge any PRs though.
I guess you have a point there, seeing as after many months of waiting we finally have a comment on this PR from someone with real involvement in Ollama - see https://github.com/ollama/ollama/pull/5059#issuecomment-2628... . Of course this is very welcome news.
wkat4242
It's not really welcome news, he is just saying they're putting it on the long finger because they think other stuff is more important. He's the same guy that kept ignoring the KV cache quant merge.
And the actual patch is tiny..
I think it's about time for a bleeding-edge fork of ollama. These guys are too static and that is not what AI development is all about.
smcleod
That qkv PR was mine! Small world.
washadjeffmad
>So where's the non-sketchy, non-for-profit equivalent
llama.cpp, kobold.cpp, oobabooga, llmstudio, etc. There are dozens at this point.
And while many chalk the attachment to ollama up to a "skill issue", that's just venting frustration that all something has to do to win the popularity contest is to repackage and market it as an "app".
I prefer first-party tools, I'm comfortable managing a build environment and calling models using pytorch, and ollama doesn't really cover my use cases, so I'm not it's audience. I still recommend it to people who might want the training wheels while they figure out how not-scary local inference actually is.
evilduck
> llama.cpp, kobold.cpp, oobabooga
None of these three are remotely as easy to install or use. They could be, but none of them are even trying.
> lmstudio
This is a closed source app with a non-free license from a business not making money. Enshittification is just a matter of when.
v9v
I would argue that kobold.cpp is even easier to use than Ollama. You click on the link in the README to download an .exe and doubleclick it and select your model file. No command line involved.
Which part of the user experience did you have problems with when using it?
Aurornis
It’s so hard to decipher the complaints about ollama in this comment section. I keep reading comments from people saying they don’t trust it, but then they don’t explain why they don’t trust it and don’t answer any follow up questions.
As someone who doesn’t follow this space, it’s hard to tell if there’s actually something sketchy going on with ollama or if it’s the usual reactionary negativity that happens when a tool comes along and makes someone’s niche hobby easier and more accessible to a broad audience.
bloomingkales
they don’t explain why they don’t trust it
We need to know a few things:
1) Show me the lines of code that log things and how it handles temp files and storage.
2) No remote calls at all.
3) No telemetry at all.
This is the feature list I would want to begin trusting. I use this stuff, but I also don’t trust it.
Aurornis
Both ollama and llama.cpp are open source. You can check the code for both and compile both yourself.
The question is: Why is ollama considered “sketchy” but llama.cpp is not, given that both are open source?
I’m not trying to debate it. I’m trying to understand why people are saying this.
aduffy
The code is literally open source with MIT license to boot https://github.com/ollama/ollama
traverseda
>So where's the non-sketchy, non-for-profit equivalent?
Serving models is currently expensive. I'd argue that some big cloud providers have conspired to make egress bandwidth expensive.
That, coupled with the increasing scale of the internet, make it harder and harder for smaller groups to do these kinds of things. At least until we get some good content addressed distributed storage system.
woadwarrior01
> Serving models is currently expensive. I'd argue that some big cloud providers have conspired to make egress bandwidth expensive.
Cloudflare R2 has unlimited egress, and AFAIK, that's what ollama uses for hosting quantized model weights.
null
buyucu
supporting vulkan will help ollama reach the masses who don't have dedicated gpus from nvidia.
this is such a low hanging fruit that it's silly how they are acting.
lolinder
As has been pointed out in this thread in a comment that you replied to (so I know you saw it) [0], Ollama goes to a lot of contortions to support multiple llama.cpp backends. Yes, their solution is a bit of a hack, but it means that the effort to adding a new back end is substantial.
And again, they're doing those contortions to make it easy for people. Making it easy involves trade-offs.
Yes, Ollama has flaws. They could communicate better about why they're ignoring PRs. All I'm saying is let's not pretend they're not doing anything complicated or difficult when no one has been able to recreate what they're doing.
buyucu
This is incorrect. The effort it took to enable Vulkan was relatively minor. The PR is short and to be honest it doesn't do much, because it doesn't need to.
bestcoder69
Llamafile: https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile
lolinder
Llamafile is great but solves a slightly different problem very well: how do I easily download and run a single model without having any infrastructure in place first?
Ollama solves the problem of how I run many models without having to deal with many instances of infrastructure.
romperstomper
You don't need any infrastructure for llamafiles, you just download and run them (everywhere).
homebrewer
It's actually more difficult to use on linux (compared to ollama) because of the weird binfmt contortions you have to go through.
yjftsjthsd-h
What contortions? None of my machines needed more than `chmod +x` for llamafile to run.
axegon_
I think you are missing the point. To get things straight: llama.cpp is not hard to setup and get running. It was a bit of a hassle in 2023 but even then it was not catastrophically complicated if you were willing to read the errors you were getting. People are dissatisfied for two, very valid reasons: ollama gives little to no credit to llama.cpp. The second one is the point of the post: a PR has been open for over 6 months and not a huge PR at that has been completely ignored. Perhaps the ollama maintainers personally don't have use for it so they shrugged it off but this is the equivalent of "it works on my computer". Imagine if all kernel devs used Intel CPUs and ignored every non-intel CPU-related PR. I am not saying that the kernel mailing list is not a large scale version of a countryside pub on a Friday night - it is. But the maintainers do acknowledge the efforts of people making PRs and do a decent job at addressing them. While small, the PR here is not trivial and should have been, at the very least, discussed. Yes, the workstation/server I use for running models uses two Nvidia GPU's. But my desktop computer uses an Intel Arc and in some scenarios, hypothetically, this pr might have been useful.
lolinder
> To get things straight: llama.cpp is not hard to setup and get running. It was a bit of a hassle in 2023 but even then it was not catastrophically complicated if you were willing to read the errors you were getting.
It's made a lot of progress in that the README [0] now at least has instructions for how to download pre-built releases or docker images, but that requires actually reading the section entitled "Building the Project" to realize that it provides more than just building instructions. That is not accessible to the masses, and it's hard for me to not see that placement and prioritization as an intentional choice to be inaccessible (which is a perfectly valid choice for them!)
And that's aside from the fact that Ollama provides a ton of convenience features that are simply missing, starting with the fact that it looks like with llama.cpp I still have to pick a model at startup time, which means switching models requires SSHing into my server and restarting it.
None of this is meant to disparage llama.cpp: what they're doing is great and they have chosen to not prioritize user convenience as their primary goal. That's a perfectly valid choice. And I'm also not defending Ollama's lack of acknowledgment. I'm responding to a very specific set of ideas that have been prevalent in this thread: that not only does Ollama not give credit, they're not even really doing very much "real work". To me that is patently nonsense—the last mile to package something in a way that is user friendly is often at least as much work, it's just not the kind of work that hackers who hang out on forums like this appreciate.
portaouflop
llama.ccp is hard to set up - I develop software for a living and it wasn’t trivial for me. ollama I can give to my non-technical family members and they know how to use it.
As for not merging the PR - why are you entitled to have a PR merged? This attitude of entitlement around contributions is very disheartening as oss maintainer - it’s usually more work to review/merge/maintain a feature etc than to open a PR. Also no one is entitled to comments / discussion or literally one second of my time as an OSS maintainer. This is imo the cancer that is eating open source.
tharant
> As for not merging the PR - why are you entitled to have a PR merged?
I didn’t get entitlement vibes from the comment; I think the author believes the PR could have wide benefit, and believes that others support his position, thus the post to HN.
I don’t mean to be preach-y; I’m learning to interpret others by using a kinder mental model of society. Wish me luck!
pepijndevos
ramalama seems to be trying, it's a docker based approach.
buyucu
llama.cpp has supported vulkan for more than a year now. For more than 6 months now there has been an open PR to add vulkan backend support for Ollama. However, Ollama team has not even looked at it or commented on it.
Vulkan backends are existential for running LLMs on consumer hardware (iGPUs especially). It's sad to see Ollama miss this opportunity.
Kubuxu
Don’t be sad for commercial entity that is not a good player https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/11016#issuecomme...
andy_ppp
This is great, I did not know about RamaLama and I'll be using and recommending that in future and if I see people using Ollama in instructions I'll recommend they move to RamaLama in the future. Cheers.
api
This is fascinating. I’ve been using ollama with no knowledge of this because it just works without a ton of knobs I don’t feel like spending the time to mess with.
As usual, the real work seems to be appropriated by people who do the last little bit — put an acceptable user experience and some polish on it — and they take all the money and credit.
It’s shitty but it also happens because the vast majority of devs, especially in the FOSS world, do not understand or appreciate user experience. It is bar none the most important thing in the success of most things in computing.
My rule is: every step a user has to do to install or set up something halves adoption. So if 100 people enter and there are two steps, 25 complete the process.
For a long time Apple was the most valuable corporation on Earth on the basis of user experience alone. Apple doesn’t invent much. They polish it, and that’s where like 99% of the value is as far as the market is concerned.
The reason is that computers are very confusing and hard to use. Computer people, which most of us are, don’t see that because it’s second nature to us. But even for computer people you get to the point where you’re busy and don’t have time to nerd out on every single thing you use, so it even matters to computer people in the end.
jdright
Yeah, I would love an actual alternative to Ollama, but RamaLama is not it unfortunately. As the other commenter said, onboarding is important. I just want one operation install and it needs to work and the simple fact RamaLama is written in Python, assures it will never be that easy, and this is even more true with LLM stuff when using AMD gpu.
I know there will be people that disagree with this, that's ok. This is my personal experience with Python in general, and 10x worse when I need to figure out all compatible packages with specifc ROCm support for my GPU. This is madness, even C and C++ setup and build is easier than this Python hell.
bearjaws
It's hilarious that docker guys are trying to take another OSS and monetize it. Hey if it worked once?...
buyucu
I was not aware of this context, thanks!
n144q
Thanks, just yesterday I discovered that Ollama could not use iGPU on my AMD machine, and was going through a long issue for solutions/workarounds (https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/2637). Existing instructions are based on Linux, and some people found it utterly surprising that anyone wants to run LLMs on Windows (really?). While I would have no trouble installing Linux and compile from source, I wasn't ready to do that to my main, daily-use computer.
Great to see this.
PS. Have you got feedback on whether this works on Windows? If not, I can try to create a build today.
zozbot234
The PR has been legitimately out-of-date and unmergeable for many months. It was forward-ported a few weeks ago, and is now still awaiting formal review and merging. (To be sure, Vulkan support in Ollama will likely stay experimental for some time even if the existing PR is merged, and many setups will need manual adjustment of the number of GPU layers and such. It's far from 100% foolproof even in the best-case scenario!)
For that matter, some people are still having issues building and running it, as seen from the latest comments on the linked GitHub page. It's not clear that it's even in a fully reviewable state just yet.
buyucu
this pr was reviewable multiple times, rebased multiple times. all because ollama team kept ignoring it. it has been open for almost 7 months now without a single comment from the ollama folks.
ecurtin
It's gets out of date with conflicts, etc. Because it's ignored, if this was the upstream project of Ollama, llama.cpp the maintainers would have got this merged months ago.
9cb14c1ec0
The PR at issue here blocks iGPUs. My fork of the PR changes removes that:
https://github.com/9cb14c1ec0/ollama-vulkan
I successfully ran Phi4 on my AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U iGPU with it.
buyucu
this is great! I think pufferfish is taking PRs to his fork as well.
Havoc
ollama was good initially in that it made LLMs more accessible for non-technical people while everyone was figuring things out.
Lately they seem to be contributing mostly confusion to the conversation.
The #1 model the entire world is talking about is literally mislabeled their side. There is no such thing as R1-1.5b. Quantization without telling users also confuses noobs as to what is possible. Setting up an api different from the thing they're wrapping adds chaos. And claiming each feature added llama.cpp as something "ollama now supports" is exceedingly questionable especially when combined with the very sparse acknowledgement that it's a wrapper at all.
Whole thing just doesn't have good vibes
dingocat
What do you mean there is no such thing as R1-1.5b? DeepSeek released a distilled version based on a 1.5B Qwen model with the full name DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, see chapter 3.2 on page 14 of their research article [0].
trissi1996
Which is not the same model, it's not R1 it's R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B....
dingocat
A distinction they make clear and write extensively about on the model page, yes?
Havoc
ollama labels the qwen models R1, while the "R1" moniker standing on its own in deepseek world means the full model that has nothing to do with qwen.
https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1
That may have been ok if it was just same model at different sizes but they're completely different things here & it's created confusion out of thin air for absolutely no reason other than ollama being careless.
dingocat
And their documentation makes that distinction clear, having dedicated a section specifically to the distilled models.
the_mitsuhiko
Ollama needs competition. I’m not sure what drives the people that maintain it but some of their actions imply that there are ulterior motives at play that do not have the benefit of their users in mind.
However such projects require a lot of time and effort and it’s not clear if this project can be forked and kept alive.
Deathmax
The most recent one of the top of my head is their horrendous aliasing of DeepSeek R1 on their model hub, misleading users into thinking they are running the full model but really anything but the 671b alias is one of the distilled models. This has already led to lots of people claiming that they are running R1 locally when they are not.
TeMPOraL
The whole DeepSeek-R1 situation gets extra confusing because:
- The distilled models are also provided by DeepSeek;
- There's also dynamic quants of (non-distilled) R1 - see [0]. Those, as I understand it, are more "real R1" than the distilled models, and you can get as low as ~140GB file size with the 1.58-bit quant.
I actually managed to get the 1.58-bit dynamic quant running on my personal PC, with 32GB RAM, at about 0.11 tokens per second. That is, roughly six tokens per minute. That was with llama.cpp via LM Studio; using Vulkan for GPU offload (up to 4 layers for my RTX 4070 Ti with 12GB VRAM :/) actually slowed things down relative to running purely on the CPU, but either way, it's too slow to be useful with such specs.
--
zozbot234
> it's too slow to be useful with such specs.
Only if you insist on realtime output: if you're OK with posting your question to the model and letting it run overnight (or, for some shorter questions, over your lunch break) it's great. I believe that this use case can fit local-AI especially well.
adastra22
I'm not sure that's fair, given that the distilled models are almost as good. Do you really think Deepseek's web interface is giving you access to 671b? They're going to be running distilled models there too.
Deathmax
It's simple enough to test the tokenizer to determine the base model in use (DeepSeek V3, or a Llama 3/Qwen 2.5 distill).
Using the text "സ്മാർട്ട്", Qwen 2.5 tokenizes as 10 tokens, Llama 3 as 13, and DeepSeek V3 as 8.
Using DeepSeek's chat frontend, both DeepSeek V3 and R1 returns the following response (SSE events edited for brevity):
{"content":"സ","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":1
{"content":"്മ","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":2
{"content":"ാ","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":1
{"content":"ർ","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":1
{"content":"ട","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":1
{"content":"്ട","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":1
{"content":"്","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":1
zozbot234
Given that the 671B model is reportedly MoE-based, it definitely could be powering the web interface and API. MoE slashes the per-inference compute cost - and when serving the model for multiple users you only have to host a single copy of the model params in memory, so the bulk doesn't hurt you as much.
blixt
LM Studio has been around for a long time and does a lot of similar things but with a more UI-based approach. I used to use it before Ollama, and seems it's still going strong. https://lmstudio.ai/
buyucu
isn't lm stuido closed source?
7thpower
Can you please explain why you think they may be operating in bad faith?
diggan
Not parent, but same feeling.
First I got the feeling because of how they store things on disk and try to get all models rehosted in their own closed library.
Second time I got the feeling is when it's not obvious at all about what their motives are, and that it's a for-profit venture.
Third time is trying to discuss things in their Discord and the moderators there constantly shut down a lot of conversation citing "Misinformation" and rewrites your messages. You can ask a honest question, it gets deleted and you get blocked for a day.
Just today I asked why the R1 models they're shipping that are the distilled ones, doesn't have "distilled" in the name, or even any way of knowing which tag is which model, and got the answer "if you don't like how things are done on Ollama, you can run your own object registry" which doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
Another thing I noticed after a while is that there are bunch of people with zero knowledge of terminals that want to run Ollama, even though Ollama is a project for developers (since you do need to know how to run a terminal). Just making the messaging clearer would help a lot in this regarding, but somehow the Ollama team thinks thats gatekeeping and it's better to teach people basic terminal operations.
davely
For what it's worth, HuggingFace provides documentation on how you can run any GGUF model inside Ollama[0]. You're not locked into their closed library or have to wait for them to add new models.
Granted, they could be a lot more helpful in providing information on how you do this. But this feature exists, at least.
diggan
Ollama team's response (verbatim) when asking what they think of the comments about Ollama in this HN submission: "Who cares? It's the internet... everybody has an opinion... and they're usually bad". Not exactly the response you'd expect from people who should ideally learn from what others think (correct or not) about your project.
7thpower
This is helpful, thank you.
justinmayer
Benefiting users is definitely not Ollama’s first priority, as seen when this pull request was summarily closed: https://github.com/jmorganca/ollama/pull/395
Those README changes only served to provide greater transparency to would-be users.
Ulterior motives, indeed.
prabir
There is https://cortex.so/ that I’m looking forward too.
adastra22
Hey thanks, I didn't know about cortex and this looks perfect.
imtringued
Ollama doesn't really need competition. Llama.cpp just needs a few usability updates to the gguf format so that you can specify a hugging face repository like you can do in vLLM already.
buyucu
I totally agree that ollama needs competition. They have been doing very sketchy things lately. I wish llama.cpp had an alternative wrapper client like ollama.
Liquix
agreed. but what's wrong with Jan? does ollama utilize resources/run models more efficiently under the hood? (sorry for the naivete)
benxh
My biggest gripe with Ollama is the badly named models, e.g. under deepseek-r1, it defaults to the distill models.
buyucu
I agree they should rename them.
But defaulting to a 671b model is also evil.
rfoo
No. If you can't run it and most people can never run the model on their laptop, it's fine, let people know the fact, instead of giving them illusion.
Mashimo
Letting people download 400GB just to find that out is also .. not optimal.
But yes, I have been "yelled" at on reddit for telling people you need vram in the hundreds of GB.
singularity2001
at least the distilled models are officially provided by deepseek (?)
trash_cat
I use Ollama because I am a casual user and can't be bothered to read the docs on how to setup llama.cpp. I just want to run a simple llm locally.
Why would I care about Vulkan?
buyucu
with vulkan it runs much much faster on consumer hardware, especially opn igpus like intel or amd.
zozbot234
Well, it definitely runs faster on external dGPU's. With iGPU's and possibly future NPU's, the pre-processing/"thinking" phase is much faster (because that one is compute-bound) but text generation tends to be faster on CPU because it makes better use of available memory bandwidth (which is the relevant constraint there). iGPU's and NPU's will still be a win wrt. energy use, however.
bdhcuidbebe
For Intel, OpenVINO should be the preferred route. I dont follow AMD, but Vulkan is just the common denominator here.
buyucu
If you support Vulkan, you support almost every GPU out there in the consumer market across all hardware vendors. It's an amazing fallback option.
I agree they should also support OpenVINO, but compared to Vulkan OpenVINO is a tiny market.
sebazzz
How is the performance of Vulkan vs ROCm on AMD iGPUs? Ollama can be persuaded to run on iGPUs with ROCm.
a12k
Ollama is sketchy enough that I run it in a VM. Which is odd because it would probably take less effort to just run Llama.cpp directly, but VMs are pretty easy so just went that route.
When I see people bring up the sketchiness most of the time the creator responds with the equivalent of shrugs, which imo increases the sketchiness.
nialv7
It's fully open source. I mean yes it uses llama.cpp without giving it credit. But why run it in a VM?
a12k
It severely over-permissions itself on my Mac.
null
super_mario
Can you please elaborate? How are you running ollama? I just build it from source and have written a shell script to start/stop it. It runs under my local user account (I should probably have its own user) and is of course not exposed outside localhost.
celeritascelery
I have never had it request any permissions
andreasmetsala
Just install it from Brew and run the service in a separate terminal tab.
instagary
Isn't there a clause in MIT that says you're required to give credit? Also, I didn't know a YC company which started it: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ollama.
aduffy
The project existed in the open source and then subsequently the creators sought funding to work on it full time.
krowek
> But why run it in a VM?
Because you don't execute untrusted code in your machine without containerization/virtualization. Don't you?
Aurornis
The question was asking why it’s untrusted code, not why you run untrusted code in a VM.
There are a lot of open-source tools that we have to trust to get anything done on a daily basis.
adastra22
Every single day. There's just too much good software out there, and life is too short to be so paranoid.
n144q
Care to elaborate what "sketchy" refers to here?
nicce
> but VMs are pretty easy so just went that route.
Don’t you need at least 2 GPUs in that case and put kernel level passthrough?
a12k
I don’t use GPU. Works fine, but the large Mixtral models are slow.
bdhcuidbebe
i pass through my dGPU to VM and use iGPU for desktop
buyucu
ollama advertising llama.cpp features as their own is very dishonest in my opinion.
portaouflop
That’s the curse and blessing of open source I guess? I have billion dollar companies running my oss software without giving me anything - but do I gripe about it in public forums? Yea maybe sometimes but it never helps to improve the situation.
weinzierl
It's the curse of permissively licensed open source. Copyleft is not the answer to everything but against companies leeching and not giving back it is effective.
sitkack
Are they a wrapper with a similar name? You, like I, do gripe in public forums.
adastra22
Welcome to open source.
mschwaig
Ollama tries to appeal to a lowest common denominator user base, who does not want to worry about stuff like configuration and quants, or which binary to download.
I think they want their project to be smart enough to just 'figure out what to do' on behalf of the user.
That appeals to a lot of people, but I think them stuffing all backends into one binary and auto-detecting at runtime which to use and is actually a step too far towards simplicity.
What they did to support both CUDA and ROCm using the same binary looked quite cursed last time I checked (because they needed to link or invoke two different builds of llama.cpp of course).
I have only glanced at that PR, but I'm guessing that this plays a role in how many backends they can reasonably try to support.
In nixpkgs it's a huge pain that we configure quite deliberately what we want Ollama to do at build time, and then Ollama runs off and does whatever anyways, and users have to look at log output and performance regressions to know what it's actually doing, every time they update their heuristics for detecting ROCm. It's brittle as hell.
buyucu
I disagree with this, but it's a reasonable argument. The problem is that the Ollama team has basically ignored the PR, instead of engaging the community. The least they can do is to explain their reasoning.
This PR is #1 on their repo based on multiple metrics (comments, iterations, what have you)
your_challenger
I don't know why one would use Ollama instead of llama.cpp. llama.cpp is so easy to use and the maintainer is pretty famous and active in the community.
buyucu
Llama.cpp dropped support for multimodal vlms. That is why I am using ollama. I would happily switch back if I could.
Gracana
llama.cpp readme still lists multimodal models.. Qwen2-VL and others. Is that inaccurate, or something different?
[edit] Oh I see, here's an issue about it: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/8010
buyucu
it's a grey zone but vlms are effectively not being developed anymore.
av_conk
I tried using ollama because I couldn't get ROCm working on my system with llama-cpp. Ollama bundles the ROCm libraries for you. I got around 50 tokens per second with that setup.
I tried llama-cpp with the Vulkan backend and doubled the amount of tokens per second. I was under the impression ROCm is superior to Vulkan, so I was confused about the result.
In any case, I've stuck with llama-cpp.
buyucu
It depends on your GPU. Vulkan is well-supported by essentially all GPUs. AMD support ROCm well for their datacenter GPUs, but support for consumer hardware has not been as good.
paradite
Could it be that supporting multiple platforms open up more support tickets and adds more work to keep the software working on those new platforms?
As someone who built apps for Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android, it is not trivial to ensure your new features or updates work on all platforms, and you have to deal with deprecations.
geerlingguy
They already support ROCm, which probably introduces 10x more support requests than Vulkan would!
buyucu
ollama is not doing anything. llama cpp does all that work. ollama is just a small wrapper on top.
zozbot234
This is not quite correct. Ollama must assess the state of Vulkan support and amount of available memory, then pick the fraction of the model to be hosted on GPU. This is not totally foolproof and will likely always need manual adjustment in some cases.
buyucu
the work involved is tiny compared to the work llama.cpp did to get vulkan up and running.
this is not rocket science.
paradite
Ok assuming what you said is correct, why wouldn't Ollama then be able to support Vulkan by default out of the box?
Sorry I'm not sure what's the relationship exactly between the two projects. This is a genuine questions, not a troll question.
buyucu
check the PR, it's a very short one. It's not more complicated than setting a compile time flag.
I have no idea why they have been ignoring it.
Ollama is just a friendly front end for llama.cpp. It doesn't have to do any of those things you mentioned. Llama.cpp does all that.
turnsout
This is going to sound like a troll, but it's an honest question: Why do people use Ollama over llama.cpp? llama.cpp has added a ton of features, is about as user-friendly as Ollama, and is higher-performance. Is there some key differentiator for Ollama that I'm missing?
SkyPuncher
Ollama - `brew install ollama`
llama.cpp - Read the docs, with loads of information and unclear use cases. Question if it has API compatibility and secondary features that a bunch of tools expect. Decide it's not worth your effort when `ollama` is already running by the time you've read the docs
LorenDB
Additionally, Ollama makes model installation a single command. With llama.cpp, you have to download the raw models from Huggingface and handle storage for them yourself.
trissi1996
Not really, llama.cpp can download for quite some time, not as elegant as ollama but:
llama-server --model-url "https://huggingface.co/bartowski/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B-GGUF/resolve/main/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B-IQ4_XS.gguf"
singularity2001
ollama run deepseek-r1:14b
portaouflop
I can only speak for myself but to me llama.ccp looks kind of hard to use (tbh never tried to use it), whereas ollama was just one cli command away. Also I had no idea that its equivalent, I thought llama.ccp is some experimental tool for hardcore llm cracks, not something that I can teach my for example my non-technical mom to use.
Looking at the repo of llama.ccp it’s still not obvious to me how to use it without digging in - I need to download models from huggingface it seems and configure stuff etc - with ollama I type ollama get or something and it works.
Tbh I don’t just that stuff a lot or even seriously, maybe once per month to try out new local models.
I think having an easy to use quickstart would go a long way for llama.ccp - but maybe it’s not intended for casual (stupid?) users like me…
Majromax
In my mind, it doesn't help that llama.cpp's name is that of a source file. Intuitively, that name screams "library for further integration," not "tool for end-user use."
n144q
https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/discussions/9565
Discussions under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40693391
(I recommend doing a search yourself first)
Basically, if you know how to use a computer, you can use Ollama (almost). You can't say the same thing about llama.cpp. Not everyone knows how to build from source, or even what "build" means.
paradite
For starters:
- It doesn't have a website
- It doesn't have a download page, you have to build it yourself
woadwarrior01
> - It doesn't have a download page, you have to build it yourself
I'd wager that anyone capable enough to run a command line tool like Ollama should also be able to download prebuilt binaries from the llama.cpp releases page[1]. Also, prebuilt binaries are available on things like homebrew[2].
a12k
I am very technically inclined and use Ollama (in a VM, but still) because of all the steps and non-obviousness of how to run Llama.cpp. This framing feels a bit like the “Dropbox won’t succeed because rsync is easy” thinking.
n144q
And you still need to find and download the model files yourself, among other steps, which is intimidating enough to drive away most users, including skilled software engineers. Most people just want it to work and start using it for something else as soon as possible.
The same reason I use apt install instead of compiling from source. I can definitely do that, but I don't, because it's just a way to get things installed.
paradite
Ok I was looking at the repo from mobile and missed the releases.
Still it's not immediate obvious from README that there is an option to download it. There are instructions on how to build it, but not how to download it. Or maybe I'm blind, please correct me.
baq
I'm perfectly capable of compiling my own software but why bother if I can curl | sh into ollama.
mrkeen
I used both. I had a terrible time with llama, and did not realise it until I used ollama.
I owned an RTX2070, and followed the llama instructions to make sure it was compiling with GPU enabled. I then hand-tweaked settings (numgpulayers) to try to make it offload as much as possible to the GPU. I verified that it was using a good chunk of my GPU ram (via nvidia-smi), and confirmed that with-gpu was faster than cpu-only. It was still pretty slow, and influenced my decision to upgrade to an RTX3070. It was faster, but still pretty meh...
The first time I used ollama, everything just worked straight out of the box, with one command and zero configuration. It was lightning fast. Honestly if I'd had ollama earlier, I probably wouldn't have felt the need to upgrade GPU.
serial_dev
Maybe it was lightning fast because the model names are misleading? I installed it to try out deepseek, I was surprised how small the download artifact was and how easily it ran on my simple 3 years old Mac. I was a bit disappointed as deepseek gave bad responses and I heard it should be better than what I used on OpenAI… only to then realize after reading it on Twitter that I got a very small version of deepseek r1.
Maybe you were running a different model?
bildung
If it was faster with ollama, then you most probably just downloaded a different model (hard to recognize with ollama). Ollama only adds UX to llama.cpp, and nothing compute-wise.
stuaxo
The server in llama-cpp is documented as being only for demonstration, but ollama supports it as a model to run it.
For work, we are given Macs and so the GPU can't be passed through to docker.
I wanted a client/server where the server has the LLM and runs outside of Docker, but without me having to write the client/server part.
I run my model in ollama, then inside the code use litellm to speak to it during local development.
rakatata
While not rocketscience, a lot of its features requires to know how to recompile the project with passing certain variables. Also you need to properly format prompts for each instructor model.
buyucu
I use ollama because llama.cpp dropped support for vlms. I would happily switch back if llama.cpp starts supporting vlms again.
So many here are trashing on Ollama, saying it's "just" nice porcelain around llama.cpp and it's not doing anything complicated. Okay. Let's stipulate that.
So where's the non-sketchy, non-for-profit equivalent? Where's the nice frontend for llama.cpp that makes it trivial for anyone who wants to play around with local LLMs without having to know much about their internals? If Ollama isn't doing anything difficult, why isn't llama.cpp as easy to use?
Making local LLMs accessible to the masses is an essential job right now—it's important to normalize owning your data as much as it can be normalized. For all of its faults, Ollama does that, and it does it far better than any alternative. Maybe wait to trash it for being "just" a wrapper until someone actually creates a viable alternative.