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[DO NOT MERGE][DRAFT] fix#50

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bolins/mm-zerocopy-shm
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[DO NOT MERGE][DRAFT] fix#50
BolinSNLHM wants to merge 3 commits into
mainfrom
bolins/mm-zerocopy-shm

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@BolinSNLHM

@BolinSNLHM BolinSNLHM commented Jul 8, 2026

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Purpose

Test Plan

Test Result


Essential Elements of an Effective PR Description Checklist
  • The purpose of the PR, such as "Fix some issue (link existing issues this PR will resolve)".
  • The test plan, such as providing test command.
  • The test results, such as pasting the results comparison before and after, or e2e results
  • (Optional) The necessary documentation update, such as updating supported_models.md and examples for a new model.

BolinSNLHM and others added 3 commits July 7, 2026 15:18
…Queue

Large multimodal pixel_values tensors (100-200MB) were pickle-serialized
into the broadcast payload on the engine (THPStorage_writeFileRaw) and
deserialized on every local TP reader (THPStorage_readFileRaw), blocking
the EngineCore step loop ~1s per large image with all GPUs idle.

Add ShmTensorArena: a slotted shared-memory region (per-slot reader flags,
same protocol as ShmRingBuffer). A Pickler.reducer_override diverts large
contiguous CPU tensors into a free slot (single memcpy) and pickles only a
(slot, nbytes, dtype, shape) stub; readers rebuild the tensor as a
zero-copy torch.frombuffer view of the mapped slot. Slots are released
lazily at the reader's next dequeue (worker loop is sequential, so the
previous step's HtoD has completed). The writer never blocks: no free
slot or oversize tensor falls back to the default in-band pickling.

Env knobs: VLLM_SHM_TENSOR_ARENA (default on), _SLOTS (8), _SLOT_MB (256),
_MIN_MB (8). Local readers only; disabled when remote readers exist.

Unit test: 199MB bf16 roundtrip to 2 forked readers = 66.7ms enqueue
(vs ~1275ms pickled), checksums exact, slot reuse + fallback verified.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The zero-copy tensor views the tmpfs mapping; without pinning, the HtoD
pays first-touch page faults + pageable staging (~600-800ms observed for
a 192MB image). Lazy one-time cudaHostRegister at first get_tensor makes
every later HtoD a true DMA. Falls back gracefully when the process has
no CUDA context.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Documents the multimodal engine->worker transport bottleneck (in-band
pickle of large pixel_values tensors in MessageQueue.enqueue, per-rank
deserialize, engine-loop head-of-line blocking) and the ShmTensorArena
zero-copy design that removes it, including the pinning rationale,
configuration knobs, validation results, and known limitations.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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