@sweet-search/native-linux-x64-gnu-cuda

NVIDIA CUDA-enabled native binaries for sweet-search on Linux x86-64 (glibc).

This package is a platform-scoped optionalDependency of the main sweet-search package. npm installs it automatically on matching hosts:

• os === 'linux'
• cpu === 'x64'
• libc === 'glibc' (Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL/SUSE — not Alpine/musl)

On non-matching platforms, npm silently skips this package.

What's inside

• sweet-search-native.node — napi-rs addon built with the cuda,flash-attn Cargo features. Embedding + late-interaction inference dispatch to candle-cuda when libcuda.so.1 is present at runtime; otherwise the addon fails to load and sweet-search falls back to the CPU-only @sweet-search/native-linux-x64-gnu variant via core/infrastructure/native-resolver.js.
• sweet-search — Rust CLI binary (identical to the non-CUDA Linux x64 package; the CUDA feature lives in the napi addon, not the CLI).

Runtime requirements

• Linux x86-64 with glibc ≥ 2.31 (Ubuntu 20.04 / Debian 11 / RHEL 9 or newer)
• NVIDIA driver ≥ 525 providing libcuda.so.1
• Compute capability ≥ 7.0 (Volta V100 / Turing T4 / Ampere A100, H100, RTX 3090/4090 / Ada L4 / Hopper)
• libcudart.so.12 from CUDA Toolkit 12.x — the binary is linked against CUDA 12.2 at build time

Flash-attention kernels require SM 8.0+ (Ampere+). On SM 7.0/7.5 hardware the flash-attn path is skipped at runtime and candle's naive attention is used instead — the binary supports both paths.

Install

This package is normally installed automatically as an optionalDependency:

npm install sweet-search

On a Linux x64 host with a working NVIDIA driver, npm pulls this CUDA-enabled addon, core/infrastructure/native-resolver.js prefers it over the plain @sweet-search/native-linux-x64-gnu variant, and indexing uses the GPU.

Detecting whether CUDA is armed

Runtime detection is authoritative. Run sweet-search init — its report prints one of:

• NVIDIA GPU: <name> (CC x.y, N MB, driver M.m.p) — candle-cuda armed when this addon loaded cleanly and nvidia-smi + Device::new_cuda(0) both succeeded.
• A warning that the standard CPU-only package should be installed when the -cuda addon was resolved but failed to initialize (typically missing libcuda.so.1 or an incompatible driver).

.sweet-search/config.json records the decision under runtime.hardware (cudaAddonEnabled, cudaAvailable, cudaReason, candleGpuBackend, inferenceBackendPreference). See docs/INIT_STRATEGY.md → "CUDA Backend" for the full contract.

Troubleshooting

To force-disable CUDA without uninstalling the package:

export SWEET_SEARCH_CUDA=0    # or pass --skip-cuda to `sweet-search init`

Parity between the CUDA path and the CPU reference is validated pre-release with node scripts/parity-cuda.js (see docs/INIT_STRATEGY.md for the check's min/mean thresholds).