lllm3090

Local LLM serving for a single consumer GPU, with a browser control panel.

A llama.cpp engine, a web UI on loopback that starts and stops it and downloads models, and a curated model list where every entry has been checked to fit 24 GB with a usable context left over — recomputed for whatever card it finds.

Install

Debian 13 or a derivative (Ubuntu 24.04 / 26.04), an NVIDIA GPU — the catalogue is curated for 24 GB and computed for whatever you have — and the driver already working:

# uv, if you do not have it: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

uv tool install lllm3090
lllm3090 setup

setup checks the hardware, installs the one apt package the engine needs, fetches a pinned llama.cpp build and starts the panel as a user service. It is safe to re-run and skips whatever is already done.

It touches nothing outside $HOME except libvulkan1, and downloads no model weights — you pick those from the panel.

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8080, download Qwen3-8B (5 GB) to prove the install works, and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (17.7 GB) for real use — at 126 tok/s it is the fastest model that also reaches a full 262k context, which is what agentic work needs. gpt-oss-20b decodes faster still, at 160, in half the room.

Use

lllm3090 models          # what exists, what fits, what is downloaded
lllm3090 start Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
lllm3090 status
lllm3090 claude          # launch Claude Code against the local model
lllm3090 tui             # the panel, drawn in the terminal
lllm3090 stop            # free the VRAM

The engine exposes both the OpenAI API (/v1/chat/completions) and Anthropic's (/v1/messages) on 127.0.0.1:1919, so Claude Code and OpenAI-compatible clients both work against it without a translation proxy.

What travels to another card, and what does not

The catalogue makes two kinds of claim, and they do not travel together.

Whether a model fits, and what context it leaves, is arithmetic over capacity. The GPU is detected and the figures are computed for that card, so they are right on a 4090, on a 32 GB 5090, on a 96 GB PRO 6000, and on a 16 GB 5080 where most of the catalogue does not fit at all. An unrecognised card gets a profile synthesised from what nvidia-smi reports rather than falling back to 3090 assumptions.

How fast it runs is a measurement, true of the card it was taken on and nowhere else. Every tokens-per-second figure here was measured on an RTX 3090. Elsewhere they are labelled (other card) and are never scaled by a bandwidth ratio — that produces a guess which prints like a measurement.

So the name is the card it was built and measured on, not a limit on where it runs. lllm3090 bench is how another card gets real numbers of its own; see other cards.

Documentation

https://gilesknap.github.io/lllm3090

If you are weighing this against Ollama, LM Studio or llama-swap, that comparison is written down: what else is out there, and what this does that they do not — including when you should use one of them instead.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome, including small ones — a model that works, a speed measured on a card nobody here owns. CONTRIBUTING.md has the setup, the three commands CI runs, and how to add a catalogue entry. No GPU is needed to work on this; the test suite runs without one.

The panel

Engine state and VRAM on one line at the top, then one list of every model — what is on this disk and what is merely available — with what fits this card and what it will do, and the engine log streaming underneath. Each row carries the only control that makes sense for it: Start, Stop, Get, Cancel, or a too big pill. Click a row to read what the model is for. Downloads run in the background with progress, and resume from a part file if interrupted.

On a machine with no browser within reach of it — a text console, an SSH session without a tunnel — lllm3090 tui draws the same panel in the terminal.