Building DLLs

This document provides instructions to replicate our Windows DLL builds.

Requirements:

• Windows 11 (x64)

• Build Tools for Visual Studio 2022

• MSYS2

• CUDA 12.9.1

• AMD HIP SDK 7.1.1

• Vulkan SDK 1.4.341.1

In the MSYS shell

As our Makefile makes massive use of unix shell applications, it's much easier to just replicate that environment. We'll need it just to setup the repo (with make setup), which initializes all the submodules and applies our patches to the original code. In theory after the setup you should also be able to run make -j8 to build llamafile with cosmocc on Windows (but honestly, why?)

• install the required tools (vim is not really required)

pacman -S git patch unzip wget make vim

• create a build workspace

mkdir /c/Users/Your_Username/workspace
cd /c/Users/Your_Username/workspace

• clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile

• setup

cd llamafile
make setup

In the Windows terminal

After the repo is set up, you can build the cuda / rocm / vulkan DLLs as follows. The .bat files to run the builds are in the llamafile directory and accept the following parameters:

• --clean to restart a build from scratch

• --output to provide a custom output filename for the dll (default is ggml-xxxx.dll in the current directory for xxxx in (cuda, rocm, vulkan)

• only for the cuda libraries, you also have the --cublas option to link the library against NVIDIA's cublas instead of tinyblas

Also note that for cuda and rocm libraries there are *_parallel.bat scripts that should work faster by parallelizing compilation and taking advantage of your compute. Here's how you call the build scripts:

• cd to the llamafile dir and start CUDA parallel build (this will run for a while...)

cd c:\Users\Your_Username\Workspace\llamafile
llamafile\cuda_parallel.bat

images/win_cuda_build.png

• run ROCm parallel build as follows:

llamafile\rocm_parallel.bat

• run Vulkan build as follows (parallel is not needed, this is usually much faster than the other two):

llamafile\vulkan.bat

At the end of this process, you should have the following libraries available in your llamafile directory (note that sizes might differ):

03/31/2026  02:15 PM       717,095,936 ggml-cuda.dll
03/31/2026  02:44 PM       502,854,656 ggml-rocm.dll
03/31/2026  02:46 PM        31,482,880 ggml-vulkan.dll

To run llamafile with these libraries, add them in your home directory or bundle them in your llamafile (see Creating a llamafile).