Qwen3-8B on WSL2: My Context Test Stopped at the Host RAM Guard
Six single-sample Qwen3-8B scouts on an 8GB RTX 5060 Ti, followed by an incomplete primary batch stopped below 2 GiB of available host RAM.
VRAM LAB / SECTION
The experiment notebook.
Questions, conditions, results, and their limits.
Hugging Face Streaming on WSL2: Cache and Repeated Reads
streaming=True on WSL2: actual cache files, first-row latency, RAM and repeated HTTP reads. CSV and Parquet, 60 measured processes.
Long Prompts on a 16GB M4: Memory, Swap, and First Response
Qwen3-8B on a 16GB M4: nine Metal runs measure first response, RSS, KV memory, compression and swap. A separate 16K scout hit a 120-second cutoff.
HF_DATASETS_CACHE on WSL2: Where the Other Files Go
Measured Hub downloads, Arrow files, import order, saved datasets, and cleanup on WSL2. Why HF_DATASETS_CACHE and cache_dir leave other files behind.
llama.cpp Mixed KV Cache on RTX 5060 Ti: q8_0/q4_0 Test
On an RTX 5060 Ti, llama.cpp's default CUDA build sent mixed q8_0/q4_0 Flash Attention to CPU; one build flag restored CUDA and an 86x PP gap.
PyTorch 2.13 on RTX 5060 Ti: cu126 vs cu130 vs cu132
All three PyTorch 2.13 wheels saw my RTX 5060 Ti, but cu126 mixed working dot/GEMM paths with missing native CUDA kernels.
torch.cuda.is_available() Returns False on WSL2: 4 Tested Causes
I tested four reasons torch.cuda.is_available() returns False on WSL2: a CUDA 13 driver mismatch, CPU-only wheel, hidden GPU, and wrong Python.
Fix WSL2 Resize Error Wsl/Service/0xc03a001a (2.7.3)
On WSL 2.7.3, compressed and sparse VHDX files booted but --resize failed with 0xc03a001a; clearing the attribute restored 9/9 retries.
Hugging Face Cache on WSL2: HF_HOME, /mnt/c, and Cleanup
I tested HF_HOME, HF_HUB_CACHE, symlinks, and /mnt/c on WSL2, then measured cleanup behavior with the current hf cache commands.
Shrink WSL2 ext4.vhdx in 2026: Sparse VHD vs diskpart, Measured
Deleted 20 GB inside WSL but ext4.vhdx stayed huge? Measured on WSL 2.7.3: fstrim no longer needed, sparse VHD gated as unsafe, diskpart rejects sparse files.