Pangram verdict · v3.3
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v0.28.0 Highlights This release features 584 commits from 270 contributors (76 new)! Kimi-K3 performance push: a major optimization effort for Kimi-K3 across the stack — Decode Context Parallel (DCP) support (#50484), fused FlashKDA decode and prefill kernels (#50654, #51311, #52458), SiTU activation support for MegaMoE (#50510), GEMM-RS for sequence parallelism (#52079), combined all-gathers with 1.5~3x kernel-level speedup (#51070), an adaptive speculative token budget delivering ~60% better DSpark TTFT (#51725), and optional shared-expert sharding saving ~17 GiB of memory per GPU (#50912). Kimi-K3 also now runs on ROCm with the V2 model runner (#51653).
DeepSeek V4: sparse MLA now works end-to-end for plain decode, MTP, and DSpark speculative decoding (#51538), joined by AMD Quark NVFP4 support (#47972), reasoning-effort prompts and mappings (#50580), sparse top-k metadata kernel optimizations (#52084, #51967), narrowed eager CUDA graph regions (#51430, #52401), and ROCm enablement on gfx11 and gfx950 (#47017, #52212). Speculative decoding advances: DFlash2 with local convolution and a candidate selector (#52816), DSpark confidence-scheduled verification (#47808), and async scheduling auto-enabled for draft models (#48341).
Model Runner V2 maturation: E/P/D disaggregation (#38390), weight offloading (#51413), multi-layer MTP KV cache support (#50062), encoder CUDA graphs (#49852), decoder token-wise pooling (#50931) plus Transformers pooling models (#52425), attention-free models (#52374), and thinking_token_budget support (#46727). Tiered KV cache offloading: disk offloading support (#49644), out-of-tree secondary tier managers via module_path (#51007), partial secondary-tier load results (#50321), tiering metrics (#48798), and a canonical CPU layout for parallelism-agnostic offload (#48414).
Rust frontend & gRPC: a standalone renderer (#50289), multimodal image inference over gRPC (#50368), explicit data-parallel rank routing (#51178), and RL lifecycle control (#51316), with protobuf schemas now published to Buf (#51276).
New defaults: max_num_batched_tokens raised from 8192 to 16384 (#51726), prefix caching enabled by default for Mamba models (#50991), and the Blackwell CUDA graph capture default raised to 1024 (#49390). Breaking changes: bitsandbytes support migrated to an out-of-tree plugin (#43529); Transformers bumped to 5.15.0 (#51668); the deprecated calculate_kv_scales runtime KV scale calculation was removed (#49389); override_attention_dtype was removed (#48684). Release Artifacts Python Wheels Platform Install PyPI (CUDA 13.0) pip install vllm PyPI (CUDA 13.0, uv) uv pip install vllm --torch-backend=auto ROCm pip install vllm --extra-index-url https://wheels.vllm.ai/rocm/0.28.0/rocm722 Docker Images Platform Docker Image CUDA 13.0 (Default) docker pull vllm/vllm-openai:v0.28.0 (v0.28.0-cu130 also works) CUDA 12.9 docker pull vllm/vllm-openai:v0.28.0-cu129 CUDA 13.0 + Ubuntu 24.04 docker pull vllm/vllm-openai:v0.28.0-ubuntu2404 CUDA 12.9 + Ubuntu 24.04 docker pull vllm/vllm-openai:v0.28.0-cu129-ubuntu2404 ROCm docker pull vllm/vllm-openai-rocm:v0.28.0 CPU docker pull vllm/vllm-openai-cpu:v0.28.0 XPU docker pull vllm/vllm-openai-xpu:v0.28.0 Other Artifacts Pre-built release artifacts are available in the Assets section at the bottom of this page, including: Source distribution tarball CUDA 12.9 Python wheels for x86_64 and arm64 CUDA 13.0 Python wheels for x86_64 and arm64 CPU Python wheels for x86_64, arm64, and macOS Model Support New models: Muse Glimmer (#51655), Ling 3.0 Flash with BF16, MTP, and parser support (#51045) plus an FP8 variant (#51265) and hybrid MXFP4 routed experts (#52114), Dots3 NOTE native multimodal support (#51255), and Interns2mobius (#51149). Qwen: Qwen3.8 enabled on AMD ROCm (#50068), fused CUDA post-conv MTP decode kernel for Qwen3.5 GDN (#51674), GDN gates aligned with speculative tokens (#51812), and Qwen3.5 fixes for text-only checkpoints (#50734, #50355). Transformers modeling backend: MLA support (#48250), hardware-agnostic model definition (#49458), fully generalized input embedding handling (#51247), logit softcapping (#52173), and a hardened multimodal path (#51408, #51657). LoRA: vision tower LoRA for Gemma4 (#42662), tower/connector LoRA for Keye (#51780) and Ultravox (#48215). Vision encoders: ViT full CUDA graph for Kimi-K2.5 (#50929) and Ernie-4.5-VL (#45254, #51461), torch.compile for the Qwen3-VL encoder (#40116), and long-blocking H2D copies avoided in ViT (#51841). MoE: extended EPLB support for Mistral Large 3 and additional MoE backends (#48355), CuTe DSL skinny GEMM extended to GLM-5.2 (#49791). Speculative decoding coverage: EAGLE3 support declared on KimiLinear (#52171), Qwen3.6 dSpark acceptance coverage (#51310). Correctness: MiniMax-M3 NVFP4 inference (#48929) and compressed-tensors FP8 MoE SwiGLU params (#46845), Gemma3n/Gemma4 variable-length audio batch padding (#50958), Gemma 4 compatibility with the upcoming Transformers version (#49797), and a Qwen3-Omni crash on video without an audio track (#48420). Multimodal performance: fused on-device multimodal preprocess normalization (#50411), faster placeholder and token-match scanning (#50716), and repeated prompt-update scans avoided (#51774). Engine Core Speculative decoding: DSpark confidence-scheduled verification (#47808), top-k DSpark Markov projection (#49969), DFlash2 with local convolution and a candidate selector (#52816), async scheduling auto-enabled for draft models (#48341), fused MTP trailing all-reduce with local-argmax draft tokens (#49793), and an adaptive budget for speculative scheduled input tokens (#51725). KV cache & scheduling: per-request scheduling for MLA chunked context (#50613), partial-tail prefix reuse with fine-grained prefix matching (#50507), backend-published KV packing in the KV-cache layout refactor (#51612, #51704), LIFO free-block reuse order restored when prefix caching is off (#51482), and silent request skipping in priority scheduling fixed (#49206).
Performance: continued elimination of GPU<->CPU syncs on the execution path (#51458, #51738, #52369) now guarded by a CI sync check (#43107), new JIT warmup infrastructure with predicate filtering (#49315), the top-k/top-p Triton sampler launched with 8 warps (#51507), detokenization skipped in offline beam search (#50333), Mask Replay (#49577), optimized long-context MLA cache gathers (#51739), and HF revisions resolved to a commit hash once per model load (#49990).
Hybrid/Mamba: prefix caching on by default (#50991), the final part of the Mamba attention module refactor (#44857), 3D-grid tiling of the state-copy Triton kernels (#49436), and Mamba alignment applied before encoder caps (#51603).
RL workflows: stateful trainer send over NCCL and sparse NCCL (#50902), CuMemAllocator.discard() for tag-selective GPU memory release (#52514), level-2 sleep/wake/reload fixed with LoRA enabled (#39935), and rewritten weight-transfer docs with standardized examples (#51729). Startup robustness: file:// rendezvous for single-node executors eliminates startup port races (#50999, #51652), frontend processes are watched during engine startup (#43417), a get_open_port() livelock on DP-reserved ports was fixed (#50965), and NVML is no longer re-initialized on every device-capability check (#50393). Hardware & Performance NVIDIA: FlashInfer XQA decode support on SM12x (#49718), a CuTeDSL fused query kernel on SM100 (#49792), programmatic dependent launch for the DSA decode kernels (#50230), the native DSA decode path for MTP=3 on SM90 (#52164), GB10 fused-MoE FP8 tuning configs (#52502), and B12X dense linear backends (#52016). AMD ROCm: torch 2.12 / triton 3.7 stack bump (#50607), AITER and FP8 inference enabled on GFX120x (#43615), DeepSeek-V4 on gfx11 (#47017), optimized Triton sparse-MLA decode on gfx950 (#52212), FlyDSL decode-attention kernel for 4-bit TurboQuant KV cache (#47896) and an fp8 MQA logits kernel on gfx942 (#49544), a fused Kimi-K3 KDA decode kernel (#50654), fused bf16→fp32 router GEMM (#50268), pinned memory on supported WSL2 kernels (#50126), and preshuffled sparse indexing for 16-token blocks (#51216). Intel XPU: a torch linear backend including blockwise GEMM (#49664, #50826), MXFP8 linear weights for the INC DeepSeek V4 model (#48476), async-scheduling PP sampled-token broadcast overlapped with compute (#51650), an XPU wheel added to the release pipeline (#52108), tuned Mamba SSU configs for Arc Pro B70 (#50534), and UVA weight offloading fixes (#51770).
CPU: an MLA backend so DeepSeek-V2/V3 can run on CPU (#49453), a triton-cpu wheel (#52092), GPTQ and AWQ enabled on s390x (#51148) along with tcmalloc (#50841), BF16 MoE routed through zentorch on AMD (#44201), an unquantized MoE backend for Power (VSX) (#51624), unquantized MoE migrated to the modular-kernel experts structure (#50133), and the MXFP4 block scale folded in 2 instructions instead of 4 (#51583). Large Scale Serving E/P/D disaggregation: Model Runner V2 E/P/D support (#38390), duplicate image preprocessing removed with GPU-side preprocessing (#50390), KV consumers may omit multimodal embeddings (#52697), encoder-instance requests kept alive until their images are encoded (#50275), and EC connector scheduler/worker metadata plumbing (#49579, #49585). KV offloading: disk offloading for SimpleCPUOffloadConnector (#49644), out-of-tree secondary tier managers via module_path (#51007), partial secondary-tier load results (#50321), tiering offloading metrics (#48798), data-parallel topology exposed to offloading backends (#51879), a canonical CPU layout for parallelism-agnostic offload (#48414), and quadratic ARC batch eviction avoided (#50992). Mooncake: store group semantics (#44956), tenant ID support (#48069), and official wheels in the Docker image (#51067).