Troubleshooting

On any platform, if your llamafile process is immediately killed, check if you have CrowdStrike and then ask to be whitelisted.

Mac

On macOS with Apple Silicon you need to have Xcode Command Line Tools installed for llamafile to be able to bootstrap itself.

If you use zsh and have trouble running llamafile, try saying sh -c ./llamafile. This is due to a bug that was fixed in zsh 5.9+. The same is the case for Python subprocess, old versions of Fish, etc.

Mac error "... cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified"

1. Immediately launch System Settings, then go to Privacy & Security. llamafile should be listed at the bottom, with a button to Allow.

2. If not, then change your command in the Terminal to be sudo spctl --master-disable; [llama launch command]; sudo spctl --master-enable. This is because --master-disable disables all checking, so you need to turn it back on after quitting llama.

Linux

On some Linux systems, you might get errors relating to run-detectors or WINE. This is due to binfmt_misc registrations. You can fix that by adding an additional registration for the APE file format llamafile uses:

sudo wget -O /usr/bin/ape https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/ape-$(uname -m).elf
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/ape
sudo sh -c "echo ':APE:M::MZqFpD::/usr/bin/ape:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register"
sudo sh -c "echo ':APE-jart:M::jartsr::/usr/bin/ape:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register"

Windows

As mentioned above, on Windows you may need to rename your llamafile by adding .exe to the filename.

Also as mentioned above, Windows also has a maximum file size limit of 4GB for executables. The LLaVA server executable above is just 30MB shy of that limit, so it'll work on Windows, but with larger models like WizardCoder 13B, you need to store the weights in a separate file. An example is provided above; see "Using llamafile with external weights."

On WSL, there are many possible gotchas. One thing that helps solve them completely is this:

[Unit]
Description=cosmopolitan APE binfmt service
After=wsl-binfmt.service

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c "echo ':APE:M::MZqFpD::/usr/bin/ape:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Put that in /etc/systemd/system/cosmo-binfmt.service.

Ensure that the APE loader is installed to /usr/bin/ape:

sudo wget -O /usr/bin/ape https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/ape-$(uname -m).elf
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/ape

Then run sudo systemctl enable --now cosmo-binfmt.

Another thing that's helped WSL users who experience issues, is to disable the WIN32 interop feature:

sudo sh -c "echo -1 > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/WSLInterop"

In Windows 11 with WSL 2 the location of the interop flag has changed, as such the following command be required instead/additionally:

sudo sh -c "echo -1 > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/WSLInterop-late"

In the instance of getting a Permission Denied on disabling interop through CLI, it can be permanently disabled by adding the following in /etc/wsl.conf

[interop]
enabled=false