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Comment by frabonacci

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Comment by frabonacci

> this won't speed up llama.cpp for everyone, just for users running it in this particular kind of Virtualization.framework VM.

correct. these figures apply to llama.cpp inside the macOS guest configuration we tested. Lume is the VM frontend we used, while Apple's Virtualization.framework provides the virtual GPU. bare-metal llama.cpp is unaffected.

> The fix here works around a problem where the VM was causing llama.cpp to select the wrong kernels.

mostly, with one nuance: llama.cpp is selecting the correct kernels for the capability answers it receives. the stock guest reports an older Apple GPU family and a 32 KB threadgroup memory limit, so llama.cpp chooses slower kernels. Our process-scoped layer reports the tested Apple 9 and 64 KB values while allowing llama.cpp to select newer paths that the paravirtual GPU successfully execute

the layer itself though works at the Metal API boundary, independently of llama.cpp. other Metal compute and graphics apps now may select newer paths from the same capability answers, although this is still preliminary and each app needs separate testing. for example, MLX-LM stayed flat in our tests

historically related limitations have been coming up across Apple Silicon VM frontends for a while e.g. Tart tracked MPS/GPU support back in 2023: - https://github.com/openai/tart/issues/501 - https://github.com/openai/tart/issues/1032

UTM also has related cases where apps detect the Apple paravirtual Metal device but falls back to software rendering: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/7671

Replies frabonacci · 2026-08-11
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