v0.9.1rc1

This is the 1st release candidate of v0.9.1 for vLLM Ascend. Please follow the official doc to get started.

Experimental

• Atlas 300I series is experimental supported in this release (Functional test passed with Qwen2.5-7b-instruct/Qwen2.5-0.5b/Qwen3-0.6B/Qwen3-4B/Qwen3-8B). #1333
• Support EAGLE-3 for speculative decoding. #1032

After careful consideration, above features will NOT be included in v0.9.1-dev branch (v0.9.1 final release) taking into account the v0.9.1 release quality and the feature rapid iteration. We will improve this from 0.9.2rc1 and later.

Core

• Ascend PyTorch adapter (torch_npu) has been upgraded to 2.5.1.post1.dev20250528. Don’t forget to update it in your environment. #1235
• Support Atlas 300I series container image. You can get it from quay.io
• Fix token-wise padding mechanism to make multi-card graph mode work. #1300
• Upgrade vLLM to 0.9.1 [#1165]#1165

Other Improvements

• Initial support Chunked Prefill for MLA. #1172
• An example of best practices to run DeepSeek with ETP has been added. #1101
• Performance improvements for DeepSeek using the TorchAir graph. #1098, #1131
• Supports the speculative decoding feature with AscendScheduler. #943
• Improve VocabParallelEmbedding custom op performance. It will be enabled in the next release. #796
• Fixed a device discovery and setup bug when running vLLM Ascend on Ray #884
• DeepSeek with MC2 (Merged Compute and Communication) now works properly. #1268
• Fixed log2phy NoneType bug with static EPLB feature. #1186
• Improved performance for DeepSeek with DBO enabled. #997, #1135
• Refactoring AscendFusedMoE #1229
• Add initial user stories page (include LLaMA-Factory/TRL/verl/MindIE Turbo/GPUStack) #1224
• Add unit test framework #1201

Known Issues

• In some cases, the vLLM process may crash with a GatherV3 error when aclgraph is enabled. We are working on this issue and will fix it in the next release. #1038
• Prefix cache feature does not work with the Ascend Scheduler but without chunked prefill enabled. This will be fixed in the next release. #1350

Full Changelog

v0.9.0rc2...v0.9.1rc1

New Contributors

• @farawayboat made their first contribution in #1333
• @yzim made their first contribution in #1159
• @chenwaner made their first contribution in #1098
• @wangyanhui-cmss made their first contribution in #1184
• @songshanhu07 made their first contribution in #1186
• @yuancaoyaoHW made their first contribution in #1032

Full Changelog: v0.9.0rc2...v0.9.1rc1