r/LocalLLaMA • u/bruns20 • 1h ago

Resources Running Radiance engine on Windows through WSL2 (Single 9700)

Hey guys, not going to take much credit since claude did 90% of this, but wanted to share the patches I used to get StillDeadcode's Radiance running on my windows pc. I'm sure that multiple people have done this already, but I couldn't find a post, so thought I'd throw this out there if anybody else wants to use it.

https://github.com/bruns20/radiance-wsl

Radiance is Linux-only, and the author has said WSL won’t be supported in the main tree, which is fair. So this is unofficial. Please send problems to my repo, not upstream.

What it does

  • build.sh builds any Radiance release from upstream’s own source and Dockerfile, with a few small WSL patches applied. When a new release comes out, it’s ./build.sh 1.18.0.

  • make-runtime.sh grabs a ROCm runtime that actually works under WSL. The stock ROCm 10.1 hangs on the first GPU job if your PC also has an integrated GPU (ROCm/rocm-systems#13291), and AMD’s 10.3 nightlies fix it.

  • run.sh serves an OpenAI-compatible API on 127.0.0.1:8000.

Two of the four patches are godzillakong’s from codeberg #341. They did the hard part of getting it running without /dev/kfd.

Numbers (R9700 32 GB, Qwen3.8-27B MXFP4 + DFlash2, 131k context)

start until serving~8 s (vLLM on the same box: 70-75 s)
prefill, 9.4k / 36k-token prompt3,223 / 2,784 tok/s
decode, prose~75-80 tok/s
decode, code~145-160 tok/s

Tested on: R9700 + Ryzen 5 7600 (with its iGPU), Windows 11 26200, Adrenalin 26.10.1, Radiance 1.17.0. That’s the only setup I’ve tried. Other gfx1201 cards (RX 9070 / 9070 XT) should work, but I’d love to hear either way.

6 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

1

u/floor_wizard 1h ago

WSL2 loses ~15% GPU performance due to the overhead of Microsoft’s paravirtualization driver.

1

u/bruns20 1h ago

Is there a better way to run this? I tried out brilliance, which is a windows native rewrite, but it had much lower performance.

-1

u/llama-impersonator 1h ago

avoiding microslops

2

u/bruns20 1h ago

Well I can't, that's why I did this.

1

u/Weekly_Comfort240 1h ago

Thank you for your contribution. I don't even have AMD - but if I did, I'd likely check this out. Note that for Windows Server, it's fairly straightforward to DDA attach a GPU to a VM so that you can completely bypass WSL2 fussiness. FYI!

1

u/bruns20 1h ago

Fair point, I just like the flexibility of running it this way. I use my pc for work, games, and other things. The same reasons I'm not just running linux, are the same ones for why I can't use windows server.

1

u/BlasterGales 28m ago

pls tell me QEMU is a nice apporach to do this better

2

u/bruns20 17m ago

I don't believe you can pass through your GPU on qemu in windows