FAQ

What is an engine? A program that runs a model on your GPU: llama.cpp, llama-swap, Ollama, vLLM, ComfyUI, a voice server. Berth doesn't run models; it decides which engine has the card.

Why not just llama-swap? Use both. llama-swap swaps the models in its own config. Berth covers the whole card, including ComfyUI, games and the stray process holding memory that neither tool started. See Berth and llama-swap.

Can a 700B model take turns on a 24 GB card? No. Berth gives each engine the whole card in turn, or a sized share with --needs-mib; it doesn't make a model fit that doesn't.

How reliable is it? Alpha. It runs every day on the author's RTX 4090 workstation, and v0.3 added contrib/chaos, the swap bench and the tested hardware table so you can check it on yours.

AMD? Windows? AMD on Linux and a full Windows node are planned for v0.4. Windows with NVIDIA works today as experimental, and contrib/windows/check.ps1 checks it on your machine; see the support matrix.

Can Berth handle ComfyUI on the host and vLLM in Docker? Yes. Start each one under its own lease: berth run --as comfyui -- python ... for ComfyUI, and berth run --as vllm --container vllm -- docker run --rm --name vllm --gpus all ... vllm/vllm-openai for vLLM. The container's GPU processes are parented by containerd-shim, so the process tree cannot reach them; the lease names the container instead, Berth matches the processes by container ID, and the drain runs docker stop -t 30 vllm (podman's when podman resolved it) instead of signalling the wrapper. The handoff waits for the driver to show the container's memory gone, as with a host process. A container Berth did not start is still a stowaway: reported with its container ID, report only, never signalled. Details in contrib/INTEGRATION.md.