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Handle capped SWA admission in allocator path#40027

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besquared wants to merge 3 commits intovllm-project:mainfrom
thedatamates:fix-39866-allocator-guard
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Handle capped SWA admission in allocator path#40027
besquared wants to merge 3 commits intovllm-project:mainfrom
thedatamates:fix-39866-allocator-guard

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@besquared besquared commented Apr 16, 2026

Purpose

Follow-up to #39866.

#39866 fixes the original head-of-line scheduler stall by capping SWA admission budgeting, but there is still an
admission/allocation mismatch in one edge case:

  • get_num_blocks_to_allocate() uses the capped SWA budget
  • the later allocation path can still effectively require the uncapped number of blocks
  • in that case, admission succeeds, but allocation raises:

ValueError: Cannot get 1 free blocks from the pool

This PR keeps the capped SWA admission behavior from #39866, but adds an uncapped safety check before allocation so this path returns None cleanly instead of throwing.

Test Plan

Focused unit test:

python -m pytest tests/v1/core/test_prefix_caching.py -k hybrid_swa_cap_does_not_crash_allocator -q

The added test reproduces the mismatch directly at KVCacheManager.allocate_slots() with:

- one full-attention group
- one sliding-window group
- exhausted free block pool
- full group exactly satisfied
- SWA group short by one block

## Test Result

Before this change:

- allocate_slots(...) raises:
    - ValueError: Cannot get 1 free blocks from the pool

After this change:

- the same setup returns None

Focused test result on top of #39866:

- 1 passed

The added regression test is:

def test_hybrid_swa_cap_does_not_crash_allocator():
    block_size = 16
    sliding_window = 64
    num_tokens = 200
    request_id = "r"

    manager = KVCacheManager(
        kv_cache_config=KVCacheConfig(
            num_blocks=26,  # 25 usable blocks + 1 null block.
            kv_cache_tensors=[],
            kv_cache_groups=[
                KVCacheGroupSpec(
                    ["full"],
                    FullAttentionSpec(
                        block_size=block_size,
                        num_kv_heads=1,
                        head_size=1,
                        dtype=torch.float32,
                    ),
                ),
                KVCacheGroupSpec(
                    ["swa"],
                    SlidingWindowSpec(
                        block_size=block_size,
                        num_kv_heads=1,
                        head_size=1,
                        dtype=torch.float32,
                        sliding_window=sliding_window,
                    ),
                ),
            ],
        ),
        max_model_len=4096,
        hash_block_size=block_size,
        max_num_batched_tokens=32,
        enable_caching=True,
    )

    req = make_request(request_id, [1] * num_tokens, block_size, sha256)
    full_required_blocks = (num_tokens + block_size - 1) // block_size

    allocated = manager.block_pool.get_new_blocks(
        manager.block_pool.num_gpu_blocks - 1
    )
    full_mgr, swa_mgr = manager.coordinator.single_type_managers

    full_mgr.req_to_blocks[request_id] = allocated[:full_required_blocks]
    swa_mgr.req_to_blocks[request_id] = allocated[
        full_required_blocks:full_required_blocks + (full_required_blocks - 1)
    ]

    assert manager.block_pool.get_num_free_blocks() == 0

    # Expected behavior: return None, not crash.
    assert manager.allocate_slots(req, num_new_tokens=num_tokens) is None

For hybrid SWA+full-attention models (e.g., Gemma 4), the
can_fit_full_sequence admission gate passes full_num_tokens to
get_num_blocks_to_allocate for all layer groups, including sliding
window groups. Since total_computed_tokens is 0 for new requests,
get_num_skipped_tokens returns 0, causing SWA groups to budget
ceil(full_num_tokens / block_size) blocks instead of the window-
sized amount they actually need.

This over-budget throttles concurrent request admission. On Gemma 4
31B with 50 SWA layers (window=1024) and max_num_batched_tokens=8192,
each SWA group budgets 1001 blocks instead of 576, causing 4
concurrent 65K-context sessions to be serialized through the gate.

Fix: In KVCacheCoordinator.get_num_blocks_to_allocate, cap
effective_num_tokens for SlidingWindowManager groups at
sliding_window + max_num_batched_tokens. The window term is the
steady-state max blocks, and the chunk term accounts for blocks
needed during a single prefill chunk before remove_skipped_blocks
frees OOW blocks. This matches TensorRT-LLM's getNeededBlocksOneStep.

Plumbing: max_num_batched_tokens flows from SchedulerConfig through
KVCacheManager and get_kv_cache_coordinator to all coordinator
subclasses.

Signed-off-by: Jhao-Ting Chen <jhaotingc@nvidia.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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@mergify mergify Bot added the v1 label Apr 16, 2026
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Code Review

This pull request implements Sliding Window Attention (SWA) budget capping in the KV cache allocator to prevent over-allocation. It introduces max_num_batched_tokens across the KV cache management stack and adds a secondary safety check in allocate_slots to ensure the allocator does not fail when requests already hold blocks. Feedback suggests refactoring the allocate_slots method to use a dictionary for shared arguments in get_num_blocks_to_allocate calls, improving maintainability by adhering to the DRY principle.

Comment thread vllm/v1/core/kv_cache_manager.py Outdated
@besquared besquared force-pushed the fix-39866-allocator-guard branch 2 times, most recently from c4a3e64 to 50dc6e4 Compare April 16, 2026 14:36
@besquared besquared force-pushed the fix-39866-allocator-guard branch from 50dc6e4 to bbfb686 Compare April 16, 2026 14:39
@besquared besquared changed the title Fix 39866 allocator guard Guard uncapped SWA allocation after capped admission (Fix #39866) Apr 16, 2026
@besquared besquared changed the title Guard uncapped SWA allocation after capped admission (Fix #39866) Handle capped SWA admission in allocator path (Fix #39866) Apr 16, 2026
@besquared besquared changed the title Handle capped SWA admission in allocator path (Fix #39866) Handle capped SWA admission in allocator path Apr 16, 2026
@jhaotingc
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Hi @besquared so this resolves the issue you find on 39866? thanks for fixing.
(just asking so I don't need to personally test it)

@besquared
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Yes the crash doesn't happen with this applied and it's been running gemma4 MoE and dense fine for 12+ hours straight under heavy concurrency with full saturation on my RTX 6K Pro.

Current runtime stack on our side:

Base:

  • b075604da[Bugfix] Fix Gemma4 tool parser converting bare null to string "null" (#39679)

On top of that:

  • #39690[Core] Move EAGLE drop from KV cache managers to coordinators
  • #39866[Scheduler] Cap SWA admission budget at sliding_window + chunk_size
  • #40027Guard uncapped SWA allocation after capped admission

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