Ollama on Intel Arc (Meteor Lake) via Docker

Garth, this is the “NetYeti” way to fix those “retries.” We’re using the Primary (P) layer of your PACE plan—a containerized approach that bypasses the “manageable mess” of manual SYCL builds.

The Strategy

We have transitioned to the ghcr.io/ava-agentone/ollama-intel image. This community-maintained build replaces the archived intelanalytics image and provides superior support for Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake iGPUs via Level Zero and SYCL.

The docker-compose.yml

services:
  ollama-arc:
    image: ghcr.io/ava-agentone/ollama-intel:latest
    container_name: ollama-arc
    environment:
      - OLLAMA_INTEL_GPU=true
      - OLLAMA_DEBUG=1
      - OLLAMA_KEEP_ALIVE=-1  # Keep models loaded for instant response
    volumes:
      - ./ollama_data:/root/.ollama
      - /home/netyeti/.ssh/id_ed25519_ollama:/root/.ollama/id_ed25519:ro
      - /home/netyeti/.ssh/id_ed25519_ollama.pub:/root/.ollama/id_ed25519.pub:ro
    devices:
      - /dev/dri/card1:/dev/dri/card1
      - /dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128
    ports:
      - "11434:11434"
    restart: unless-stopped
    shm_size: '16gb'  # Shared memory for Intel iGPUs
    mem_limit: 32g

How to Deploy

1. Navigate to Network/Services/Ollama/.
2. Pull and Start:

   docker compose up -d

3. Verify the Handshake: Check the container logs to see if it detects the GPU:

   docker logs ollama-arc | grep -E "GPU|level_zero|SYCL0"

Common Pitfall: "Archived Image"

The original `intelanalytics/ipex-llm-inference-cpp-xpu` image was archived on Jan 28, 2026. If you see "404 Not Found" during a pull, you must update your `docker-compose.yml` to use the `ava-agentone` image.

Knowledge Check

• Why are we ignoring intel_gpu_top? Because it’s an i915-focused tool. On Meteor Lake (Xe driver), it’s looking for the wrong “speedometer.” The engine is running fine, the tool is just “lost.”
• Why /dev/dri/card1? On some Meteor Lake systems, card0 is the display controller and card1 (or vice-versa) is the compute engine. Passing both ensures the container finds the right hardware for SYCL acceleration.

Related: index, index