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vLLM Metal is a plugin that enables vLLM to run on Apple Silicon Macs using MLX as the primary compute backend. It unifies MLX and PyTorch under a single lowering path. --- *Latest News* 🔥 - [2026/08] vLLM Metal now uses M5 NAX tensor units to accelerate MHA, GQA, and MQA prefill. - [2026/08] Qwen3.8 now runs on Metal! `mlx-community/Qwen3.8-27B-8bit` serves a 27B hybrid SDPA + GDN linear model on a single Apple Silicon Mac. - [2026/04] We released the new version v0.2.0! Unified paged varlen Metal kernel is now the default attention backend. 83x TTFT, 3.6x throughput compared to v0.1.0. --- ## Architecture Upstream vLLM supplies the API server, scheduler, and paged block manager; mlx_lm supplies the token-wise model layers; vllm-metal owns the request-aware attention path — the paged varlen kernel, M5 NAX prefill, and speculative decoding.  ## Requirements - macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, on Apple Silicon ## Supported Models vllm-metal supports a growing set of models on Apple Silicon. See the full matrix in [docs/supported_models.md](docs/supported_models.md). ## Installation - **Stable release:** Install with Homebrew, then run `vllm` without activating an environment. ```bash brew tap vllm-project/vllm-metal https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm-metal brew install vllm-project/vllm-metal/vllm-metal ``` - **Latest development build:** Use the curl installer, then activate its environment. No compiler needed. ```bash curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vllm-project/vllm-metal/main/install.sh | bash source ~/.venv-vllm-metal/bin/activate ``` - **Contributing Python or kernel code:** Follow the [source setup](docs/CONTRIBUTING.md#development-setup) for an editable checkout and native build tools.