troubleshooting.md

# How to troubleshoot issues

Sometimes Ollama may not perform as expected. One of the best ways to figure out what happened is to take a look at the logs. Find the logs on **Mac** by running the command:

```shell
cat ~/.ollama/logs/server.log
```

On **Linux** systems with systemd, the logs can be found with this command:

```shell
journalctl -u ollama --no-pager --follow --pager-end
```

When you run Ollama in a **container**, the logs go to stdout/stderr in the container:

```shell
docker logs <container-name>
```

(Use `docker ps` to find the container name)

If manually running `ollama serve` in a terminal, the logs will be on that terminal.

When you run Ollama on **Windows**, there are a few different locations. You can view them in the explorer window by hitting `<cmd>+R` and type in:
- `explorer %LOCALAPPDATA%\Ollama` to view logs.  The most recent server logs will be in `server.log` and older logs will be in `server-#.log`
- `explorer %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Ollama` to browse the binaries (The installer adds this to your user PATH)
- `explorer %HOMEPATH%\.ollama` to browse where models and configuration is stored

To enable additional debug logging to help troubleshoot problems, first **Quit the running app from the tray menu** then in a powershell terminal

```powershell
$env:OLLAMA_DEBUG="1"
& "ollama app.exe"
```

Join the [Discord](https://discord.gg/ollama) for help interpreting the logs.

## LLM libraries

Ollama includes multiple LLM libraries compiled for different GPU libraries and versions. Ollama tries to pick the best one based on the capabilities of your system. If this autodetection has problems, or you run into other problems (e.g. crashes in your GPU) you can workaround this by forcing a specific LLM library.

**Experimental LLM Library Override**

You can set OLLAMA_LLM_LIBRARY to any of the available LLM libraries to limit autodetection, so for example, if you have both CUDA and AMD GPUs, but want to force the CUDA v13 only, use:

```shell
OLLAMA_LLM_LIBRARY="cuda_v13" ollama serve
```

## Installing older or pre-release versions on Linux

If you run into problems on Linux and want to install an older version, or you'd like to try out a pre-release before it's officially released, you can tell the install script which version to install.

```shell
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | OLLAMA_VERSION=0.5.7 sh
```

## Linux docker

If Ollama initially works on the GPU in a docker container, but then switches to running on CPU after some period of time with errors in the server log reporting GPU discovery failures, this can be resolved by disabling systemd cgroup management in Docker.  Edit `/etc/docker/daemon.json` on the host and add `"exec-opts": ["native.cgroupdriver=cgroupfs"]` to the docker configuration.

## NVIDIA GPU Discovery

When Ollama starts up, it takes inventory of the GPUs present in the system to determine compatibility and how much VRAM is available.  Sometimes this discovery can fail to find your GPUs.  In general, running the latest driver will yield the best results.

### Linux NVIDIA Troubleshooting

If you are using a container to run Ollama, make sure you've set up the container runtime first as described in [docker.md](./docker.md)

Sometimes the Ollama can have difficulties initializing the GPU. When you check the server logs, this can show up as various error codes, such as "3" (not initialized), "46" (device unavailable), "100" (no device), "999" (unknown), or others. The following troubleshooting techniques may help resolve the problem

- If you are using a container, is the container runtime working?  Try `docker run --gpus all ubuntu nvidia-smi` - if this doesn't work, Ollama won't be able to see your NVIDIA GPU.
- Is the uvm driver loaded? `sudo nvidia-modprobe -u`
- Try reloading the nvidia_uvm driver - `sudo rmmod nvidia_uvm` then `sudo modprobe nvidia_uvm`
- Try rebooting
- Make sure you're running the latest nvidia drivers

If none of those resolve the problem, gather additional information and file an issue:
- Set `CUDA_ERROR_LEVEL=50` and try again to get more diagnostic logs
- Check dmesg for any errors `sudo dmesg | grep -i nvrm` and `sudo dmesg | grep -i nvidia`

You may get more details for initialization failures by enabling debug prints in the uvm driver.  You should only use this temporarily while troubleshooting
- `sudo rmmod nvidia_uvm` then `sudo modprobe nvidia_uvm uvm_debug_prints=1`


## AMD GPU Discovery

On linux, AMD GPU access typically requires `video` and/or `render` group membership to access the `/dev/kfd` device.  If permissions are not set up correctly, Ollama will detect this and report an error in the server log.

When running in a container, in some Linux distributions and container runtimes, the ollama process may be unable to access the GPU.  Use `ls -lnd /dev/kfd /dev/dri /dev/dri/*` on the host system to determine the **numeric** group IDs on your system, and pass additional `--group-add ...` arguments to the container so it can access the required devices.   For example, in the following output `crw-rw---- 1 0  44 226,   0 Sep 16 16:55 /dev/dri/card0` the group ID column is `44`

If you are experiencing problems getting Ollama to correctly discover or use your GPU for inference, the following may help isolate the failure.
- `AMD_LOG_LEVEL=3` Enable info log levels in the AMD HIP/ROCm libraries.  This can help show more detailed error codes that can help troubleshoot problems
- `OLLAMA_DEBUG=1` During GPU discovery additional information will be reported
- Check dmesg for any errors from amdgpu or kfd drivers `sudo dmesg | grep -i amdgpu` and `sudo dmesg | grep -i kfd`

## Multiple AMD GPUs

If you experience gibberish responses when models load across multiple AMD GPUs on Linux, see the following guide.

- https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/radeon/en/latest/docs/install/native_linux/mgpu.html#mgpu-known-issues-and-limitations

## Windows Terminal Errors

Older versions of Windows 10 (e.g., 21H1) are known to have a bug where the standard terminal program does not display control characters correctly.  This can result in a long string of strings like `←[?25h←[?25l` being displayed, sometimes erroring with `The parameter is incorrect`  To resolve this problem, please update to Win 10 22H1 or newer.