Installation
bitsandbytes is only supported on CUDA GPUs for CUDA versions 11.0 - 12.3. 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
Alternative: Compiling from source
To compile from source, you need CMake >= 3.22.1 and Python >= 3.8 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.
PyTorch CUDA versions
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.
- Determine the path of the CUDA version you want to use. Common paths include:
/usr/local/cuda/usr/local/cuda-XX.XwhereXX.Xis the CUDA version number
Then 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, 123}
# 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 install_cuda.sh 117 ~/local 1- Set the environment variables
BNB_CUDA_VERSIONandLD_LIBRARY_PATHby 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- Now when you launch bitsandbytes with these environment variables, the PyTorch CUDA version is overridden by the new CUDA version (in this example, version 11.7) and a different bitsandbytes library is loaded.