FP8 KV Cache Bug Crashes vLLM on Workstation Blackwell GPUs at Startup
Running vLLM with FP8 KV cache on DeepSeek MLA models causes an out-of-shared-memory crash on workstation and consumer Blackwell GPUs, including the GB10 and RTX PRO 6000. The root cause is a 1,024-byte gap between the per-SM shared memory budget of 102,400 bytes and the per-block opt-in limit of 101,376 bytes on sm_120 hardware. With FP8 KV, the MLA decode kernel's second pipeline stage requires exactly 102,400 bytes, hitting the per-SM ceiling but exceeding the per-block cap. A proposed upstream fix pins num_stages to 1 for MLA kernels, which allows the server to start and generate output correctly on sm_120. Developers have flagged that a blanket fix sacrifices throughput for bf16 KV paths, and recommend computing actual tile shared-memory usage against device limits instead.
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