The project differentiates between 3 levels of contributors:
- Contributors: people who have contributed before (no special privileges)
- Collaborators (Triage): people with significant contributions, who may be responsible for some parts of the code, and are expected to maintain and review contributions for the code they own
- Maintainers: responsible for reviewing and merging PRs, after approval from the code owners
- llama.cpp uses the ggml tensor library for model evaluation. If you are unfamiliar with ggml, consider taking a look at the [examples in the ggml repository](https://github.com/ggml-org/ggml/tree/master/examples/). [simple](https://github.com/ggml-org/ggml/tree/master/examples/simple) shows the bare minimum for using ggml. [gpt-2](https://github.com/ggml-org/ggml/tree/master/examples/gpt-2) has minimal implementations for language model inference using GPT-2. [mnist](https://github.com/ggml-org/ggml/tree/master/examples/mnist) demonstrates how to train and evaluate a simple image classifier
- Execute [the full CI locally on your machine](ci/README.md) before publishing
- Verify that the perplexity and the performance are not affected negatively by your changes (use `llama-perplexity` and `llama-bench`)
- If you modified the `ggml` source, run the `test-backend-ops` tool to check whether different backend implementations of the `ggml` operators produce consistent results (this requires access to at least two different `ggml` backends)
- If you modified a `ggml` operator or added a new one, add the corresponding test cases to `test-backend-ops`
- Use the following format for the squashed commit title: `<module> : <commit title> (#<issue_number>)`. For example: `utils : fix typo in utils.py (#1234)`
- Be mindful of maintenance: most of the work going into a feature happens after the PR is merged. If the PR author is not committed to contribute long-term, someone else needs to take responsibility (you)
- Try to follow the existing patterns in the code (indentation, spaces, etc.). In case of doubt use `clang-format` (from clang-tools v15+) to format the added code
- Matrix multiplication is unconventional: [`C = ggml_mul_mat(ctx, A, B)`](https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/880e352277fc017df4d5794f0c21c44e1eae2b84/ggml.h#L1058-L1064) means $C^T = A B^T \Leftrightarrow C = B A^T.$
- Existing code should have designated collaborators and/or maintainers specified in the [CODEOWNERS](CODEOWNERS) file reponsible for:
- Reviewing and merging related PRs
- Fixing related bugs
- Providing developer guidance/support
- When adding or modifying a large piece of code:
- If you are a collaborator, make sure to add yourself to [CODEOWNERS](CODEOWNERS) to indicate your availability for reviewing related PRs
- If you are a contributor, find an existing collaborator who is willing to review and maintain your code long-term
- Provide the necessary CI workflow (and hardware) to test your changes (see [ci/README.md](https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/tree/master/ci))
- New code should follow the guidelines (coding, naming, etc.) outlined in this document. Exceptions are allowed in isolated, backend-specific parts of the code that do not interface directly with the `ggml` interfaces.
_(NOTE: for legacy reasons, existing code is not required to follow this guideline)_
The Github issues, PRs and discussions contain a lot of information that can be useful to get familiar with the codebase. For convenience, some of the more important information is referenced from Github projects: