Try AI training with ROCm and LoRA by bmwiedemann

Description

I want to setup a Radeon RX 9600 XT 16 GB at home with ROCm on Slowroll.

Goals

I want to test how fast AI inference can get with the GPU and if I can use LoRA to re-train an existing free model for some task.

Resources

• https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/compatibility/compatibility-matrix.html
• https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/science:GPU:ROCm
• https://src.opensuse.org/ROCm/
• https://www.suse.com/c/lora-fine-tuning-llms-for-text-classification/

Results

got inference working with llama.cpp:

export LLAMACPP_ROCM_ARCH=gfx1200
HIPCXX="$(hipconfig -l)/clang" HIP_PATH="$(hipconfig -R)" \
cmake -S . -B build -DGGML_HIP=ON -DAMDGPU_TARGETS=$LLAMACPP_ROCM_ARCH \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DLLAMA_CURL=ON \
-Dhipblas_DIR=/usr/lib64/cmake/hipblaslt/ \
&& cmake --build build --config Release -j8
m=models/gpt-oss-20b-mxfp4.gguf
cd $P/llama.cpp && build/bin/llama-server --model $m --threads 8 --port 8005 --host 0.0.0.0 --device ROCm0 --n-gpu-layers 999

Without the --device option it faulted. Maybe because my APU also appears there?

I updated/fixed various related packages: https://src.opensuse.org/ROCm/rocm-examples/pulls/1 https://src.opensuse.org/ROCm/hipblaslt/pulls/1 SR 1320959

benchmark

I benchmarked inference with llama.cpp + gpt-oss-20b-mxfp4.gguf and ROCm offloading to a Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB. I varied the number of layers that went to the GPU:

• 0 layers 14.49 tokens/s (8 CPU cores)
• 9 layers 17.79 tokens/s 34% VRAM
• 15 layers 22.39 tokens/s 51% VRAM
• 20 layers 27.49 tokens/s 64% VRAM
• 24 layers 41.18 tokens/s 74% VRAM
• 25+ layers 86.63 tokens/s 75% VRAM (only 200% CPU load)

So there is a significant performance-boost if the whole model fits into the GPU's VRAM.

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Update M2Crypto by mcepl

There are couple of projects I work on, which need my attention and putting them to shape:

• M2Crypto

Goal for this Hackweek

• Put M2Crypto into better shape (most issues closed, all pull requests processed)
• More fun to learn jujutsu
• Play more with Gemini, how much it help (or not).
• Perhaps, also (just slightly related), help to fix vis to work with LuaJIT, particularly to make vis-lspc working.

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issuefs: FUSE filesystem representing issues (e.g. JIRA) for the use with AI agents code-assistants by llansky3

Description

Creating a FUSE filesystem (issuefs) that mounts issues from various ticketing systems (Github, Jira, Bugzilla, Redmine) as files to your local file system.

And why this is good idea?

• User can use favorite command line tools to view and search the tickets from various sources
• User can use AI agents capabilities from your favorite IDE or cli to ask question about the issues, project or functionality while providing relevant tickets as context without extra work.
• User can use it during development of the new features when you let the AI agent to jump start the solution. The issuefs will give the AI agent the context (AI agents just read few more files) about the bug or requested features. No need for copying and pasting issues to user prompt or by using extra MCP tools to access the issues. These you can still do but this approach is on purpose different.

Goals

1. Add Github issue support
2. Proof the concept/approach by apply the approach on itself using Github issues for tracking and development of new features
3. Add support for Bugzilla and Redmine using this approach in the process of doing it. Record a video of it.
4. Clean-up and test the implementation and create some documentation
5. Create a blog post about this approach

Resources

There is a prototype implementation here. This currently sort of works with JIRA only.

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Liz - Prompt autocomplete by ftorchia

Description

Liz is the Rancher AI assistant for cluster operations.

Goals

We want to help users when sending new messages to Liz, by adding an autocomplete feature to complete their requests based on the context.

Example:

• User prompt: "Can you show me the list of p"
• Autocomplete suggestion: "Can you show me the list of p...od in local cluster?"

Example:

• User prompt: "Show me the logs of #rancher-"
• Chat console: It shows a drop-down widget, next to the # character, with the list of available pod names starting with "rancher-".

Technical Overview

1. The AI agent should expose a new ws/autocomplete endpoint to proxy autocomplete messages to the LLM.
2. The UI extension should be able to display prompt suggestions and allow users to apply the autocomplete to the Prompt via keyboard shortcuts.

Resources

GitHub repository

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Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher by ademicev0

Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher

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Description

The Problem

Running LLMs can get expensive and complex pretty quickly.

Today there are typically two choices:

1. Use cloud APIs like OpenAI or Anthropic. Easy to start with, but costs add up at scale.
2. Self-host everything - set up Kubernetes, figure out GPU scheduling, handle scaling, manage model serving... it's a lot of work.

What if there was a middle ground?

What if infrastructure scaled itself instead of making you scale it?

Can we use existing Rancher capabilities like CAPI, autoscaling, and GitOps to make this simpler instead of building everything from scratch?

Project Repository: github.com/alexander-demicev/llmserverless

---

What This Project Does

A key feature is hybrid deployment: requests can be routed based on complexity or privacy needs. Simple or low-sensitivity queries can use public APIs (like OpenAI), while complex or private requests are handled in-house on local infrastructure. This flexibility allows balancing cost, privacy, and performance - using cloud for routine tasks and on-premises resources for sensitive or demanding workloads.

A complete, self-scaling LLM infrastructure that:

• Scales to zero when idle (no idle costs)
• Scales up automatically when requests come in
• Adds more nodes when needed, removes them when demand drops
• Runs on any infrastructure - laptop, bare metal, or cloud

Think of it as "serverless for LLMs" - focus on building, the infrastructure handles itself.

How It Works

A combination of open source tools working together:

Flow:

• Users interact with OpenWebUI (chat interface)
• Requests go to LiteLLM Gateway
• LiteLLM routes requests to:
  • Ollama (Knative) for local model inference (auto-scales pods)
  • Or cloud APIs for fallback

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Explore LLM evaluation metrics by thbertoldi

Description

Learn the best practices for evaluating LLM performance with an open-source framework such as DeepEval.

Goals

Curate the knowledge learned during practice and present it to colleagues.

-> Maybe publish a blog post on SUSE's blog?

Resources

https://deepeval.com

https://docs.pactflow.io/docs/bi-directional-contract-testing

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issuefs: FUSE filesystem representing issues (e.g. JIRA) for the use with AI agents code-assistants by llansky3

Description

Creating a FUSE filesystem (issuefs) that mounts issues from various ticketing systems (Github, Jira, Bugzilla, Redmine) as files to your local file system.

And why this is good idea?

• User can use favorite command line tools to view and search the tickets from various sources
• User can use AI agents capabilities from your favorite IDE or cli to ask question about the issues, project or functionality while providing relevant tickets as context without extra work.
• User can use it during development of the new features when you let the AI agent to jump start the solution. The issuefs will give the AI agent the context (AI agents just read few more files) about the bug or requested features. No need for copying and pasting issues to user prompt or by using extra MCP tools to access the issues. These you can still do but this approach is on purpose different.

Goals

1. Add Github issue support
2. Proof the concept/approach by apply the approach on itself using Github issues for tracking and development of new features
3. Add support for Bugzilla and Redmine using this approach in the process of doing it. Record a video of it.
4. Clean-up and test the implementation and create some documentation
5. Create a blog post about this approach

Resources

There is a prototype implementation here. This currently sort of works with JIRA only.

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Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher by ademicev0

Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher

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Description

The Problem

Running LLMs can get expensive and complex pretty quickly.

Today there are typically two choices:

1. Use cloud APIs like OpenAI or Anthropic. Easy to start with, but costs add up at scale.
2. Self-host everything - set up Kubernetes, figure out GPU scheduling, handle scaling, manage model serving... it's a lot of work.

What if there was a middle ground?

What if infrastructure scaled itself instead of making you scale it?

Can we use existing Rancher capabilities like CAPI, autoscaling, and GitOps to make this simpler instead of building everything from scratch?

Project Repository: github.com/alexander-demicev/llmserverless

---

What This Project Does

A key feature is hybrid deployment: requests can be routed based on complexity or privacy needs. Simple or low-sensitivity queries can use public APIs (like OpenAI), while complex or private requests are handled in-house on local infrastructure. This flexibility allows balancing cost, privacy, and performance - using cloud for routine tasks and on-premises resources for sensitive or demanding workloads.

A complete, self-scaling LLM infrastructure that:

• Scales to zero when idle (no idle costs)
• Scales up automatically when requests come in
• Adds more nodes when needed, removes them when demand drops
• Runs on any infrastructure - laptop, bare metal, or cloud

Think of it as "serverless for LLMs" - focus on building, the infrastructure handles itself.

How It Works

A combination of open source tools working together:

Flow:

• Users interact with OpenWebUI (chat interface)
• Requests go to LiteLLM Gateway
• LiteLLM routes requests to:
  • Ollama (Knative) for local model inference (auto-scales pods)
  • Or cloud APIs for fallback

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Song Search with CLAP by gcolangiuli

Description

Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) is an open-source library that enables the training of a neural network on both Audio and Text descriptions, making it possible to search for Audio using a Text input. Several pre-trained models for song search are already available on huggingface

Goals

Evaluate how CLAP can be used for song searching and determine which types of queries yield the best results by developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in Python. Based on the results of this MVP, future steps could include:

• Music Tagging;
• Free text search;
• Integration with an LLM (for example, with MCP or the OpenAI API) for music suggestions based on your own library.

The code for this project will be entirely written using AI to better explore and demonstrate AI capabilities.

Result

In this MVP we implemented:

• Async Song Analysis with Clap model
• Free Text Search of the songs
• Similar song search based on vector representation
• Containerised version with web interface

We also documented what went well and what can be improved in the use of AI.

You can have a look at the result here:

• Result Presentation
• hw25-song-search Github repo

Future implementation can be related to performance improvement and stability of the analysis.

References

• CLAP: The main model being researched;
• huggingface: Pre-trained models for CLAP;
• Free Music Archive: Creative Commons songs that can be used for testing;

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Creating test suite using LLM on existing codebase of a solar router by fcrozat

Description

Two years ago, I evaluated solar routers as part of hackweek24, I've assembled one and it is running almost smoothly.

However, its code quality is not perfect and the codebase doesn't have any testcase (which is tricky, since it is embedded code and rely on getting external data to react).

Before improving the code itself, a testsuite should be created to ensure code additional don't cause regression.

Goals

Create a testsuite, allowing to test solar router code in a virtual environment. Using LLM to help to create this test suite.

If succesful, try to improve the codebase itself by having it reviewed by LLM.

Resources

Solar router github project

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Kubernetes-Based ML Lifecycle Automation by lmiranda

Description

This project aims to build a complete end-to-end Machine Learning pipeline running entirely on Kubernetes, using Go, and containerized ML components.

The pipeline will automate the lifecycle of a machine learning model, including:

• Data ingestion/collection
• Model training as a Kubernetes Job
• Model artifact storage in an S3-compatible registry (e.g. Minio)
• A Go-based deployment controller that automatically deploys new model versions to Kubernetes using Rancher
• A lightweight inference service that loads and serves the latest model
• Monitoring of model performance and service health through Prometheus/Grafana

The outcome is a working prototype of an MLOps workflow that demonstrates how AI workloads can be trained, versioned, deployed, and monitored using the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Goals

By the end of Hack Week, the project should:

1. Produce a fully functional ML pipeline running on Kubernetes with:

   • Data collection job
   • Training job container
   • Storage and versioning of trained models
   • Automated deployment of new model versions
   • Model inference API service
   • Basic monitoring dashboards

2. Showcase a Go-based deployment automation component, which scans the model registry and automatically generates & applies Kubernetes manifests for new model versions.

3. Enable continuous improvement by making the system modular and extensible (e.g., additional models, metrics, autoscaling, or drift detection can be added later).

4. Prepare a short demo explaining the end-to-end process and how new models flow through the system.

Resources

Project Repository

Updates

1. Training pipeline and datasets
2. Inference Service py

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MCP Server for SCC by digitaltomm

Description

Provide an MCP Server implementation for customers to access data on scc.suse.com via MCP protocol. The core benefit of this MCP interface is that it has direct (read) access to customer data in SCC, so the AI agent gets enhanced knowledge about individual customer data, like subscriptions, orders and registered systems.

Architecture

Goals

We want to demonstrate a proof of concept to connect to the SCC MCP server with any AI agent, for example gemini-cli or codex. Enabling the user to ask questions regarding their SCC inventory.

For this Hackweek, we target that users get proper responses to these example questions:

• Which of my currently active systems are running products that are out of support?
• Do I have ready to use registration codes for SLES?
• What are the latest 5 released patches for SLES 15 SP6? Output as a list with release date, patch name, affected package names and fixed CVEs.
• Which versions of kernel-default are available on SLES 15 SP6?

Technical Notes

Similar to the organization APIs, this can expose to customers data about their subscriptions, orders, systems and products. Authentication should be done by organization credentials, similar to what needs to be provided to RMT/MLM. Customers can connect to the SCC MCP server from their own MCP-compatible client and Large Language Model (LLM), so no third party is involved.

Milestones

[x] Basic MCP API setup
  MCP endpoints
  [x] Products / Repositories
  [x] Subscriptions / Orders 
  [x] Systems
  [x] Packages
[x] Document usage with Gemini CLI, Codex

Resources

• fast_mcp library for Rails
• MCP test client
• SCC branch

Gemini CLI setup:

~/.gemini/settings.json:

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