bitsandbytes is only supported on CUDA GPUs for CUDA versions 10.2 - 12.0. Select your operating system below to see the installation instructions.
For Linux systems, make sure your hardware meets the following requirements to use bitsandbytes features.
Feature | Hardware requirement |
---|---|
LLM.int8() | NVIDIA Turing (RTX 20 series, T4) or Ampere (RTX 30 series, A4-A100) GPUs |
8-bit optimizers/quantization | NVIDIA Kepler (GTX 780 or newer) |
bitsandbytes >= 0.39.1 no longer includes Kepler binaries in pip installations. This requires manual compilation, and you should follow the general steps and use cuda11x_nomatmul_kepler
for Kepler-targeted compilation.
To install from PyPI.
pip install bitsandbytes
To compile from source, you need CMake >= 3.22.1 and Python >= 3.10 installed. Make sure you have a compiler installed to compile C++ (gcc, make, headers, etc.). For example, to install a compiler and CMake on Ubuntu:
apt-get install -y build-essential cmake
You should also install CUDA Toolkit by following the NVIDIA CUDA Installation Guide for Linux guide from NVIDIA.
Now to install the bitsandbytes package from source, run the following commands:
git clone https://github.com/TimDettmers/bitsandbytes.git && cd bitsandbytes/
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
cmake -DCOMPUTE_BACKEND=cuda -S .
make
pip install .
If you have multiple versions of CUDA installed or installed it in a non-standard location, please refer to CMake CUDA documentation for how to configure the CUDA compiler.
Some bitsandbytes features may need a newer CUDA version than the one currently supported by PyTorch binaries from Conda and pip. In this case, you should follow these instructions to load a precompiled bitsandbytes binary.
/usr/local/cuda
/usr/local/cuda-XX.X
where XX.X
is the CUDA version numberThen locally install the CUDA version you need with this script from bitsandbytes:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TimDettmers/bitsandbytes/main/install_cuda.sh
# Syntax cuda_install CUDA_VERSION INSTALL_PREFIX EXPORT_TO_BASH
# CUDA_VERSION in {110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122}
# EXPORT_TO_BASH in {0, 1} with 0=False and 1=True
# For example, the following installs CUDA 11.7 to ~/local/cuda-11.7 and exports the path to your .bashrc
bash cuda_install.sh 117 ~/local 1
BNB_CUDA_VERSION
and LD_LIBRARY_PATH
by manually overriding the CUDA version installed by PyTorch.It is recommended to add the following lines to the .bashrc
file to make them permanent.
export BNB_CUDA_VERSION=<VERSION>
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:<PATH>
For example, to use a local install path:
export BNB_CUDA_VERSION=117
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/home/tim/local/cuda-11.7