A Vulkan crash in QMD memory on a Raspberry Pi 5 fixed
Claude explained why QMD's embedding service crashed on the Pi 5's VideoCore GPU and gave the fix: a systemd override forcing CPU-only embeddings.
Credits
- Reddit poster Obvious_Bit_5024 Source ↗
Earliest dated source:
The full story
Running OpenClaw with QMD memory on a Raspberry Pi 5 under Ubuntu 24.04, the maker hit a crash at start-up that knocked out semantic search, though keyword search still worked. Claude's walkthrough explained that QMD sees the Pi 5's VideoCore VII as Vulkan-capable and tries to use it for embeddings, but the GPU doesn't have enough shared memory for the matrix maths.
The fix was to tell QMD to skip the GPU by setting QMD_LLAMA_GPU=false in a systemd override for the OpenClaw gateway service. CPU-only embeddings are slower, but once the service starts cleanly semantic search works fully.
How it was done
Tools
Themes
Loading themes…
Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: QMD Memory on Raspberry Pi 5 — fix for Vulkan embedding crashReddit poster: Obvious_Bit_5024Posted
The maker's post on r/raspberry_pi.
If it disappears: archived copy of Reddit: QMD Memory on Raspberry Pi 5 — fix for Vulkan embedding crash (opens in a new tab)