Ollama troubleshooting

On WSL2 with NVIDIA/CUDA, the official Ollama Linux installer creates an ollama.service systemd unit with Restart=always. If that service autostarts and loads a GPU-backed model during WSL2 boot, Ollama can pin host memory while loading; Hyper-V memory reclaim cannot always reclaim those pages, so Windows can terminate the WSL2 VM, systemd restarts Ollama, and the loop repeats.

Evidence: repeated WSL2 reboots/terminations, high CPU in app.slice or ollama.service right after WSL2 startup, and SIGTERM from systemd rather than the Linux OOM killer.

OpenClaw logs a startup warning when it detects WSL2, ollama.service enabled with Restart=always, and visible CUDA markers.

Mitigation:

sudo systemctl disable ollama

On the Windows side, add this to %USERPROFILE%\.wslconfig, then run wsl --shutdown:

[experimental]
autoMemoryReclaim=disabled

Or shorten keep-alive / start Ollama manually only when needed:

export OLLAMA_KEEP_ALIVE=5m
ollama serve

See ollama/ollama#11317.

Confirm Ollama is running and is in the agent's model scope. For ambient localhost discovery, set OLLAMA_API_KEY (or an auth profile). An explicit self-hosted endpoint is discovered whether or not it lists models:

ollama serve
curl http://localhost:11434/api/tags

Pull the model locally, or define it explicitly in models.providers.ollama:

ollama list  # See what's installed
ollama pull gemma4
ollama pull gpt-oss:20b
ollama pull llama3.3     # Or another model

Verify from the same machine and runtime that runs the Gateway:

openclaw gateway status --deep
curl http://ollama-host:11434/api/tags

Common causes:

• baseUrl points at localhost, but the Gateway runs in Docker or on another host.
• The URL uses /v1, selecting OpenAI-compatible behavior instead of native Ollama.
• The remote host needs firewall or LAN binding changes.
• The model is on your laptop's daemon but not the remote one.

Usually the provider is in OpenAI-compatible mode, or the model cannot handle tool schemas. Prefer native mode:

{
  models: {
    providers: {
      ollama: {
        baseUrl: "http://ollama-host:11434",
        api: "ollama",
      },
    },
  },
}

If a small local model still fails on tool schemas, set compat.supportsTools: false on that model entry and retest.

OpenClaw stops after three consecutive identical failures for the same tool and arguments, including repeated unknown tool IDs. This protection is always active; enabling tools.loopDetection is not required.

On Ollama 0.40.1, some model templates can cause the server to mistake the <tool_call> marker for Tool Search's tool_call function. OpenClaw avoids this collision with transport-only tool aliases, so Tool Search can remain enabled. Execution and session history keep the original tool names; raw provider requests may show names such as openclaw_tool_call.

This translation covers native Ollama and the Ollama plugin's identified OpenAI-compatible chat-completions route. Other providers are unchanged. Custom Ollama templates with different markers may need separate diagnosis.

Check the arguments in the recorded error. If the model repeatedly invents tool names or cannot use the exposed schemas, switch to a model with native tool calling and start a new turn. Changed errors and successful retries reset the count. See Tool-loop detection.

Hosted Kimi/GLM responses that are long, non-linguistic symbol runs are treated as a failed provider call rather than a successful reply, so normal retry/fallback/error handling takes over instead of persisting corrupted text into the session.

If it recurs, capture the model name, the current session file, and whether the run used Cloud + Local or Ollama Cloud, then try a fresh session and a fallback model:

openclaw infer model run --model ollama/kimi-k2.5:cloud --prompt "Reply with exactly: ok" --json
openclaw models set ollama/gemma4

Large local models can need a long first load. Scope the timeout to the Ollama provider and optionally keep the model loaded between turns:

{
  models: {
    providers: {
      ollama: {
        timeoutSeconds: 300,
        models: [
          {
            id: "gemma4:26b",
            name: "gemma4:26b",
            params: { keep_alive: "15m" },
          },
        ],
      },
    },
  },
}

If the host itself is slow to accept connections, timeoutSeconds also extends the guarded connect timeout for this provider.

Many models advertise contexts larger than your hardware can run comfortably. Native requests forward the effective contextTokens unless params.num_ctx overrides it. Cap both OpenClaw's budget and Ollama's request context for predictable first-token latency:

{
  models: {
    providers: {
      ollama: {
        maxTokens: 8192,
        models: [
          {
            id: "qwen3.5:9b",
            name: "qwen3.5:9b",
            contextTokens: 32768,
            params: { num_ctx: 32768, thinking: false },
          },
        ],
      },
    },
  },
}

Lower the model entry's contextTokens if OpenClaw sends too much prompt. Lower params.num_ctx if Ollama's runtime context is too large for the machine. Lower maxTokens if generation runs too long.