c316679e65
### What this PR does / why we need it?
This PR fixes Minimax model loading in vLLM Ascend backend by:
Adding model type check for "minimax" and "minimax_m2" to replace "mlp"
prefix with "block_sparse_moe"
Implementing special handling for Minimax expert layer naming
conventions
Adding Minimax configuration to packed_modules_model_mapping for proper
qkv_proj and experts module handling
Without these changes, Minimax models fail to load on Ascend devices due
to incompatible layer naming and module packing.
### Does this PR introduce _any_ user-facing change?
Yes. Users can now successfully load and run Minimax models on Ascend
hardware with vLLM. This enables inference capabilities for this model
family on Ascend devices.
### How was this patch tested?
Local Testing:
Verified model loading for minimax-xxx and minimax_m2-xxx model variants
on Atlas 800I A2 hardware
Tested inference with sample prompts using vLLM's OpenAI-compatible API
server
Benchmark Validation:
Compared throughput and latency metrics against GPU baseline
Verified memory usage stays within expected limits for different batch
sizes
Tested multi-card inference scenarios with tensor parallelism
- vLLM version: v0.13.0
- vLLM main:
8be6432bda
---------
Signed-off-by: Feng-xiaosuo <tengchang1@huawei.com>
vLLM Ascend Plugin
| About Ascend | Documentation | #sig-ascend | Users Forum | Weekly Meeting |
English | 中文
Latest News 🔥
- [2025/12] We released the new official version v0.11.0! Please follow the official guide to start using vLLM Ascend Plugin on Ascend.
- [2025/09] We released the new official version v0.9.1! Please follow the official guide to start deploy large scale Expert Parallelism (EP) on Ascend.
- [2025/08] We hosted the vLLM Beijing Meetup with vLLM and Tencent! Please find the meetup slides here.
- [2025/06] User stories page is now live! It kicks off with LLaMA-Factory/verl//TRL/GPUStack to demonstrate how vLLM Ascend assists Ascend users in enhancing their experience across fine-tuning, evaluation, reinforcement learning (RL), and deployment scenarios.
- [2025/06] Contributors page is now live! All contributions deserve to be recorded, thanks for all contributors.
- [2025/05] We've released first official version v0.7.3! We collaborated with the vLLM community to publish a blog post sharing our practice: Introducing vLLM Hardware Plugin, Best Practice from Ascend NPU.
- [2025/03] We hosted the vLLM Beijing Meetup with vLLM team! Please find the meetup slides here.
- [2025/02] vLLM community officially created vllm-project/vllm-ascend repo for running vLLM seamlessly on the Ascend NPU.
- [2024/12] We are working with the vLLM community to support [RFC]: Hardware pluggable.
Overview
vLLM Ascend (vllm-ascend) is a community maintained hardware plugin for running vLLM seamlessly on the Ascend NPU.
It is the recommended approach for supporting the Ascend backend within the vLLM community. It adheres to the principles outlined in the [RFC]: Hardware pluggable, 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.
Prerequisites
- Hardware: Atlas 800I A2 Inference series, Atlas A2 Training series, Atlas 800I A3 Inference series, Atlas A3 Training series, Atlas 300I Duo (Experimental)
- OS: Linux
- Software:
- Python >= 3.10, < 3.12
- CANN == 8.3.rc2 (Ascend HDK version refers to here)
- PyTorch == 2.8.0, torch-npu == 2.8.0
- vLLM (the same version as vllm-ascend)
Getting Started
Please use the following recommended versions to get started quickly:
| Version | Release type | Doc |
|---|---|---|
| v0.13.0rc1 | Latest release candidate | QuickStart and Installation for more details |
| v0.11.0 | Latest stable version | QuickStart and Installation for more details |
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING for more details, which is a step-by-step guide to help you set up development environment, build and test.
We welcome and value any contributions and collaborations:
- Please let us know if you encounter a bug by filing an issue
- Please use User forum for usage questions and help.
Branch
vllm-ascend has main branch and dev branch.
- 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,
v0.7.3-devis the dev branch for vLLMv0.7.3version.
Below is maintained branches:
| Branch | Status | Note |
|---|---|---|
| main | Maintained | CI commitment for vLLM main branch and vLLM v0.13.0 tag |
| v0.7.1-dev | Unmaintained | Only doc fixed is allowed |
| v0.7.3-dev | Maintained | CI commitment for vLLM 0.7.3 version, only bug fix is allowed and no new release tag any more. |
| v0.9.1-dev | Maintained | CI commitment for vLLM 0.9.1 version |
| v0.11.0-dev | Maintained | CI commitment for vLLM 0.11.0 version |
| rfc/feature-name | Maintained | Feature branches for collaboration |
Please refer to Versioning policy for more details.
Weekly Meeting
- vLLM Ascend Weekly Meeting: https://tinyurl.com/vllm-ascend-meeting
- Wednesday, 15:00 - 16:00 (UTC+8, Convert to your timezone)
License
Apache License 2.0, as found in the LICENSE file.