- [2024/12] We are working with the vLLM community to support [[RFC]: Hardware pluggable](https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/issues/11162).
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## Overview
vLLM Ascend plugin (`vllm-ascend`) is a backend plugin for running vLLM on the Ascend NPU.
This plugin is the recommended approach for supporting the Ascend backend within the vLLM community. It adheres to the principles outlined in the [[RFC]: Hardware pluggable](https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/issues/11162), providing a hardware-pluggable interface that decouples the integration of the Ascend NPU with vLLM.
By using vLLM Ascend plugin, popular open-source models, including Transformer-like, Mixture-of-Expert, Embedding, Multi-modal LLMs can run seamlessly on the Ascend NPU.
> Currently, we are actively collaborating with the vLLM community to support the Ascend backend plugin, once supported you can use one line command `pip install vllm vllm-ascend` to compelete installation.
See [CONTRIBUTING](docs/source/developer_guide/contributing.md) for more details, which is a step-by-step guide to help you set up development environment, build and test.
- **main**: main branch,corresponds to the vLLM main branch, and is continuously monitored for quality through Ascend CI.
- **vX.Y.Z-dev**: development branch, created with part of new releases of vLLM. For example, `v0.7.1-dev` is the dev branch for vLLM `v0.7.1` version.
Please refer to [Versioning policy](docs/source/developer_guide/versioning_policy.md) for more details.