Gufo: The Open Source Strix Halo AI engine

Gufo is a vertical local inference engine for Linux and Windows, specifically built and optimized for AMD Strix Halo hardware: Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 systems with Radeon 8060S (gfx1151), up to 128 GiB of unified memory.

Contributions are welcome!

See the changelog and GitHub Releases for user-facing changes and release history.

[!TIP] Check out Gufo RDMA for Dual Strix Halo, a Gufo variant that has not been merged yet!

Models and benchmarks

All model documentation lives under docs/models:

Model	Inference modes	Hugging Face weights	Benchmarks	Quality
Qwen3.8 27B	Q4/Q8, images, AR, DFlash2	Unsloth Q4_K_XL / Q8_K_XL · DFlash2 Q4_K_M	Q4: 648.89 tok/s pp; up to 71.55 tok/s tg single user and 128.42 aggregated tok/s on 8 concurrent requests with DFlash2 · Benchmarks	Quality
Qwen3.8 Flash-Next	Q4, images, AR, MTP	Unsloth Q4_K_XL · MTP Q8_0	1,801.01 tok/s pp (AR); up to 116.93 tok/s tg single user and 245.81 aggregated tok/s on 8 concurrent requests with MTP · Benchmarks	Quality
DeepSeek V4 Flash	AR, DSpark	antirez Flash 0731 IQ2XXS · DSpark	484.62 tok/s pp; up to 26.62 tok/s tg single user and 54.74 aggregated tok/s on 8 concurrent requests with DSpark · Benchmarks	Quality
Qwen3-ASR 1.7B	Speech recognition	BF16	15.27× realtime · Benchmarks	Quality
EmbeddingGemma 2	Text and image embeddings	BF16	Up to 41.5k tokens/s over HTTP; 13.0 ms for a 404-token request · Benchmarks	Quality
Qwen3-TTS 1.7B	Speech synthesis and voice cloning	BF16 CustomVoice / VoiceDesign / Base	Up to 2.54× realtime; 201 ms to first audio (CustomVoice) · Benchmarks	Quality
Qwen-Image-2.1	BF16 image generation and editing	Complete pipeline	In progress · Benchmarks	Quality
MiniMax H3	BF16 text to video/audio	FL2VA pipeline	In progress · Benchmarks	Quality

Peak measured workloads; text pp is autoregressive (AR), while tg uses the named speculative mode. Peaks include repetitive output; aggregate tg sums individual request decode rates. Qwen27B's single-user peak uses the short-prompt C1 workload. Audio excludes loading. Each model guide lists the required files and complete benchmark settings.

Philosophy

• Contributions are welcome! We need the help of Strix Halo community to keep improving gufo!
• We would like this to be the one-stop shop for Strix Halo Local AI enthusiasts: batteries included for text, audio, image, and video models.
• Build and optimize specifically for the Strix Halo 128 GiB hardware. Smaller memory configurations should still work and preserve the speed benefits for models that can fit on memory.
• Support only the best available models for their size that can run on this hardware: less code to maintain, more focused optimization and testing work.
• Preserve quality when optimizing. Each model's quality report records independent numerical checks, execution consistency and unresolved gaps. Don't reuse kernels across different models to limit blast radius of a code change.
• Treat concurrent requests, cancellation and conversation caching as first-class workloads.
• Keep production dependencies small and development tools separate.

Quickstart

hf download unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF \
  Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q8_K_XL.gguf \
  --revision 4ca720788d1e01f1bff70c033e0d0028fd02e502 \
  --repo-type model \
  --local-dir models/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF
hf download z-lab/Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-GGUF \
  Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-Q4_K_M.gguf \
  --revision 2d9571f8ce46e151f61c6499c99dee6079e1d610 \
  --repo-type model \
  --local-dir models/Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-GGUF
podman pull ghcr.io/gufo-org/toolboxes/gufo-runtime:latest
podman run --rm \
  --userns=keep-id:uid=1000,gid=1000 \
  --device /dev/kfd \
  --device /dev/dri \
  --group-add keep-groups \
  --ulimit memlock=-1 \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v ./models:/models:ro \
  ghcr.io/gufo-org/toolboxes/gufo-runtime:latest \
  gufo serve --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080 llm \
  --model /models/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF/Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q8_K_XL.gguf \
  --speculative dflash2 \
  --dflash-model /models/Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-GGUF/Qwen3.8-27B-DFlash2-Q4_K_M.gguf

Rootless Podman needs crun for --group-add keep-groups. Your host user must have read/write access to /dev/kfd and /dev/dri/renderD*, usually through the render and video groups; log out and back in after changing membership. Container groups named video/render do not preserve host supplementary groups. Check id, ls -l /dev/kfd /dev/dri/renderD*, and podman info --format '{{.Host.OCIRuntime.Name}}' if ROCm reports no device. See Podman's rootless group-access guidance.

On Fedora or another SELinux-enforcing host, GPU enumeration can succeed while SELinux blocks mapping /dev/kfd, causing ROCr to report a misleading “Memory critical” error. Check the host audit log:

sudo ausearch -m avc -ts recent | grep -E '/dev/kfd|hsa_device_t'

If it shows a denied map for the container, Podman documents this fix:

sudo setsebool -P container_use_devices true

This persistently allows containers to access device labels for devices passed into them; it affects all containers on that host. Review that policy scope before enabling it. See Podman's device documentation and the SELinux container policy.

Then, from another terminal, ask it something through the OpenAI-compatible API:

curl http://localhost:8080/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q8_K_XL",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Say something"}]
  }'

For Open WebUI, VS Code, OpenAI SDK and Responses-API clients (for example Codex), set the API base URL to http://localhost:8080/v1. Chat Completions and Responses support text, images, function tools, structured output and streaming. See the API contract.

The text server uses the model's native context by default and generates until EOS or the context is full. --context N sets context capacity per session; --max-tokens N sets a default response limit that clients can override. Reasoning tokens count toward that response limit.

Harness notes

• Qwen with Codex: Codex sends developer messages mid-conversation, after compaction or a settings change. Qwen's template accepts only one leading system turn, so Gufo moves them there. The request that introduces one is prefilled again; later requests reuse the cache. See the API contract.
• Qwen with Claude Code: not supported. Claude Code adds a system message to messages on every turn, so Gufo moves a new one to the leading system turn each time and every request prefills the whole history again (#522).

Build from source

Production packages target Linux x86-64 on AMD Strix Halo (gfx1151). Windows x86-64 is a supported native build target for development; see BUILD-WINDOWS.md. CMake owns one production configuration for both Nix and ordinary Linux builds. Tests, profilers, tuning executables and Python reference runners are not installed with the production package. No build.sh wrapper is needed.

With Nix

nix build
./result/bin/gufo diagnose
./result/bin/gufo serve llm --model /path/to/model.gguf

flake.lock pins the dependencies. nix develop adds profiling, model-download and independent evaluation tools; these are not runtime requirements. Optional benchmark baselines are selected separately with nix shell .#ds4-reference, .#llama-cpp-reference or .#llama-cpp-mtp-reference; see benchmarking. See testing for the small hosted CI suite and explicit local quality checks.

Prebuilt store paths are published to the gufo Cachix cache. The flake declares it in nixConfig: users listed in trusted-users are asked to accept it, or pass --accept-flake-config. Nix ignores it for other users; add it system-wide with cachix use gufo or in /etc/nix/nix.conf:

extra-substituters = https://gufo.cachix.org
extra-trusted-public-keys = gufo.cachix.org-1:rfZe3n4lHINgyoACKzs5EthIZmBNvEyCCtufUpth0PE=

The Nix package and development shell use ROCm 10.1.0 (HIP Clang 24) from the pinned nixpkgs ROCm 10.1 update. Python, Python packages and general build dependencies come from the pinned nixos-unstable input. The ROCm package set comes from the separate fork, retaining its compiler/runtime dependencies to reuse the gfx1151 binaries on gufo.cachix.org. All Nix workflows configure this cache explicitly. Both include a queue-memory patch for Strix Halo. It keeps queue save/restore buffers, launch/copy arenas and code-loading staging resident during host memory compaction, while retaining managed-memory support and the ordinary fine-grained host-allocation policy.

Without Nix

Install a C++20 compiler, CMake 3.21+, Ninja, pkg-config and the following development libraries. The pinned Nix toolchain uses GCC 16.2 and ROCm 10.1.0 (HIP Clang 24). Attention and audio convolution kernels are compiled directly from HIP. Python, Triton/AOTriton, Composable Kernel and MIOpen are not production build or runtime requirements. For the same protection against queue evictions as the Nix build, apply the ROCr patch above when building your runtime. Flash-Next's host buffers also use Linux long-term pins, with ordinary HIP registration retained when system limits disallow those pins. Gufo leaves HSA_USERPTR_FOR_PAGED_MEM unchanged.

Dependency	Used for
ROCm HIP compiler/runtime, hipBLAS, hipBLASLt, rocBLAS	GPU execution and matrix multiplication
hipCUB, rocPRIM, rocWMMA headers	Compiled GPU kernels
ICU, libcurl, OpenSSL, libpng, libjpeg, libwebp	Tokenization, HTTPS, hashing and images
FFmpeg development libraries	Video embedding decoding and RGB conversion
libsndfile, libsoxr	Audio decoding and reference-compatible resampling
FFmpeg and ffprobe	Video/audio output; invoked as separate executables

Install ROCm using AMD's Linux instructions. Use the development packages for the libraries above. ROCm normally installs under /opt/rocm.

For example, on Debian/Ubuntu the ordinary system libraries are:

sudo apt install build-essential cmake ninja-build pkg-config \
  libicu-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libwebp-dev libsndfile1-dev libsoxr-dev libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev ffmpeg

# ROCm libraries from the table, named as AMD's repository ships them.
sudo apt install hipblas-dev hipblaslt-dev rocblas-dev \
  hipcub-dev rocprim-dev rocwmma-dev

cmake --preset release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="$HOME/.local"
cmake --build --preset release --parallel 4
./build/release/gufo diagnose
./build/release/gufo serve llm --model /path/to/model.gguf

Configuring fails at find_package(hipblas) when those ROCm packages are missing. Other distributions name them -devel instead of -dev. For nonstandard installations, pass ordinary CMake paths, for example cmake --preset release -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="/opt/rocm". If compiler discovery picks a system Clang, also pass -DCMAKE_HIP_COMPILER=/opt/rocm/llvm/bin/clang++. Use cmake --install build/release to install Gufo, its runtime data and license notices. The GPU driver must allow your user to access /dev/kfd and /dev/dri; model weights are acquired separately.

The same source, compiler flags and install rules serve both builds. Nix pins the complete toolchain for reproducible comparisons; changing the compiler or math libraries requires the affected model's quality checks.

License

Gufo's original code is MIT licensed. Adapted code and dependencies retain their own notices in NOTICE, THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and licenses/, installed under share/licenses/gufo. Model weights are not bundled and retain their publishers' terms.

Reference Projects

The initial design is informed by the following open source projects:

• llama.cpp for compact model serving, GGUF, and CPU/GPU correctness paths.
• LaurentZuijdwijk/llama.cpp, Nathanw1014/strix-halo-llamacpp, and gaetan-puleo/llama-cpp-strix-halo for Strix Halo optimization inspiration.
• vLLM for continuous batching and paged request scheduling.
• hipEngine for torch-free HIP execution, and native speculative-cycle work.
• ds4 for DeepSeek V4 Flash, MoE scheduling, and DSpark.
• audio.cpp for audio models for tts and asr tasks.