Skip to content

Forgather 1.2.1 release notes

Released: May 2026

Patch release. Documentation-only — no code changes.

The top-level README.md was retargeted at its actual audience (local-LLM hobbyists, single-person research, limited-hardware setups) and the long historical "News" section was moved into the release-notes tree where it belongs.

What changed

  • README rewritten as a landing page for r/LocalLLaMA / hobbyist researcher / limited-hardware visitors. The lede now opens with what fits on the hardware the visitor owns (single 24 GB GPU, consumer cards on a desktop, 1 Gbit Ethernet LAN, no InfiniBand) before the configuration-driven framing. Key Benefits trimmed from 10 bullets to 7 and reordered around memory and bandwidth wins.
  • Featured Examples links repointed at the real examples/... paths. They previously routed through docs/examples/... symlink mirrors (kept for mkdocs), which GitHub's web view doesn't follow, so every link in the Featured Examples table and Highlights section rendered broken on github.com.
  • News section folded into release-notes. The 14-entry news list in the README became a short "What's new" blurb on 1.2.0 plus a "Pre-1.2.0 highlights" section in docs/release-notes/. The release-notes index is now in the mkdocs nav.
  • New README sections. "Where does Forgather fit?" (names axolotl / unsloth for LoRA users; stakes Forgather's claim on training-side problems). "Hardware" mini-section (tested cards, minimum useful config, multi-node bandwidth floor, CUDA-only with ROCm / Apple Silicon as experimental). GGUF / llama.cpp / ollama / LM Studio export path spelled out in the standalone-models bullet.
  • Web UI reframed as an IDE for training workflows. Multi-node bullet rewritten to name the chore Forgather removes (hand-rolled rendezvous, dataset distribution, port forwarding, mTLS, coordinated job control across boxes) and the concrete heterogeneous-cluster scenario it supports (workstation with 3090s + borrowed gaming PCs on Ethernet + DGX Spark in one Nodes panel).
  • Cleanup. Long Featured Examples Highlights moved to examples/README.md; README keeps the table with a Headline column. Inline TOC removed (GitHub renders a sidebar TOC; the inline one also listed sections that didn't exist). Trainers / Optimizers / Distributed-Checkpointing subsections of Key Features condensed from ~100 lines of bullets into ~40 lines of prose. Dash sweep (prose -- → —; CLI flags and Jinja2 line statements untouched). vLLM-broken note promoted from a buried italic footnote to a top-of-What's-new callout.