PSA: Watch out for extra spaces in chat-template-kwargs when using Qwen3.6 with llama-server
Hey folks, just a heads-up for anyone running Qwen3.6 through llama-server. I ran into an issue where the preserve_thinking parameter wasn't working as expected, even though I had it explicitly enabled in my models.ini config.
After some digging, I found that extra spaces in the JSON string are breaking the parser for this specific parameter in my build.
❌ Does NOT work:chat-template-kwargs = { "preserve_thinking": true }
✅ Works:chat-template-kwargs = {"preserve_thinking": true}
How to test it:
The easiest way to verify if it's working is to send this prompt:think of a number from 1 to 100, don't tell me what it is, I'm going to guess it
Then check the reasoning/thinking output to verify that the "hidden" number stays consistent across your guesses. If it changes, your template kwargs are likely being parsed incorrectly.
My env:llama-server v9102 (7d442abf5) | RTX 4090
Might be a minor parsing quirk in how llama-server handles JSON in the ini file, but it's definitely worth checking. Hope this saves someone some debugging time!