Principle:Ggml org Llama cpp State Serialization
| Knowledge Sources | |
|---|---|
| Domains | State_Management |
| Last Updated | 2026-02-15 00:00 GMT |
Overview
State Serialization is the principle of saving and restoring complete inference context state including KV cache contents for session persistence.
Description
This principle covers the ability to serialize the complete runtime state of a llama.cpp inference context to a file and restore it later. This includes the KV cache contents, sequence positions, random number generator state, and other context metadata. State serialization enables session persistence, checkpointing, and context migration between processes or machines.
Usage
Apply this principle when implementing session persistence (saving a chat conversation and resuming later without re-processing the entire history), checkpointing long-running generation tasks, or migrating inference contexts between server instances.
Theoretical Basis
State serialization captures the complete mutable state of an inference context at a point in time. The primary component is the KV cache, which contains the computed key and value tensors for all processed tokens. Serializing this state avoids the need to re-process the entire token history when resuming a session. The serialization format must handle variable-length data (the KV cache size depends on how many tokens have been processed), maintain consistency between the saved state and the model parameters, and support versioning for format evolution. The save/load state example demonstrates the complete round-trip of state serialization and deserialization.