Notes on two directions for ED4’s UI that I’m unlikely to continue on. One is to start a desktop app with a full-screen webview (for the app UI). The other is writing the tabbed browser-like shell of ED4 in a compiled language (like Go or C++) and loading the contents of the tabs as regular webpages (by using webviews). So it would load URLs like http://localhost:9000/ui/image_editor and http://localhost:9000/ui/settings etc.
Worked on a few UI design ideas for Easy Diffusion v4. I’ve uploaded the work-in-progress mockups at https://github.com/easydiffusion/files. So far, I’ve mocked out the design for the outer skeleton. That is, the new tabbed interface, the status bar, and the unified main menu. I also worked on how they would look like on mobile devices. It gives me a rough idea of the Vue components that would need to be written, and the surface area that plugins can impact. For e.g. plugins can add a new menu entry only in the Plugins sub-menu.
Spent some more time on the v4 experiments for Easy Diffusion (i.e. C++ based, fast-startup, lightweight). stable-diffusion.cpp is missing a few features, which will be necessary for Easy Diffusion’s typical workflow. I wasn’t keen on forking stable-diffusion.cpp, but it’s probably faster to work on a fork for now. For now, I’ve added live preview and per-step progress callbacks (based on a few pending pull-requests on sd.cpp). And protection from GGML_ASSERT killing the entire process. I’ve been looking at the ability to load individual models (like the vae) without needing to reload the entire SD model.
Spent a few days getting a C++ based version of Easy Diffusion working, using stable-diffusion.cpp. I’m working with a fork of stable-diffusion.cpp here, to add a few changes like per-step callbacks, live image previews etc. It doesn’t have a UI yet, and currently hardcodes a model path. It exposes a RESTful API server (written using the Crow C++ library), and uses a simple task manager that runs image generation tasks on a thread. The generated images are available at an API endpoint, and it shows the binary JPEG/PNG image (instead of base64 encoding).
tl;dr - Today, I worked on using stable-diffusion.cpp in a simple C++ program. As a linked library, as well as compiling sd.cpp from scratch (with and without CUDA). The intent was to get a tiny and fast-starting executable UI for Stable Diffusion working. Also, ChatGPT is very helpful! Part 1: Using sd.cpp as a library First, I tried calling the stable-diffusion.cpp library from a simple C++ program (which just loads the model and renders an image). Via dynamic linking. That worked, and its performance was the same as the example sd.exe CLI, and it detected and used the GPU correctly.
tl;dr: Explored a possible optimization for Flux with diffusers when using enable_sequential_cpu_offload(). It did not work. While trying to use Flux (nearly 22 GB of weights) with diffusers on a 12 GB graphics card, I noticed that it barely used any GPU memory when using enable_sequential_cpu_offload(). And it was super slow. It turns out that the largest module in Flux’s transformer model is around 108 MB, so because diffusers streams modules one-at-a-time, the peak VRAM usage never crossed above a few hundred MBs.