metaljax — a Metal backend for JAX

metaljax lets unmodified JAX code run on Apple-silicon GPUs:

$ JAX_PLATFORMS=metal python -c \
    "import jax.numpy as jnp; a = jnp.array([1, 2, 3]); print(2 * a, (2*a).device)"
[2 4 6] MetalDevice(id=0)

From JAX's point of view it is a regular PJRT backend: jax.devices() reports a METAL device, and jit, grad, vmap, lax.scan, jax.random (threefry), optax training loops, etc. all work. Under the hood the compiled StableHLO programs are interpreted onto MLX arrays, which execute on the GPU via Metal.

Status: beta. Real training runs work end-to-end (transformer and recurrent language models with optax, including long lax.scan training loops), transformer training steps run within a few percent of PyTorch's MPS backend, and every release is gated by a whole-model correctness sweep against the CPU backend. Coverage gaps remain — unsupported ops fail with a clear UnsupportedOpError. If a Metal backend ever lands upstream in the JAX ecosystem, this package will be deprecated in its favor.

Install

pip install metaljax

Requirements: Apple-silicon Mac, macOS 14+, Python 3.12+, jax 0.11.x (installed automatically). Then select the backend per program:

JAX_PLATFORMS=metal python -c "import jax; print(jax.devices())"

CPU remains the default backend when JAX_PLATFORMS is unset, so installing metaljax does not change existing workflows. Installing from the source distribution (rather than the wheel) additionally requires the Xcode command-line tools, since the PJRT plugin compiles at build time.

How it works

jax.jit(f)(x)
  │  StableHLO (serialized portable artifact)
  ▼
plugin/metal_pjrt.cc          ── PJRT C-API dylib loaded by jaxlib.
  │                              No dependencies; trampolines every call
  ▼                              back into Python (same process, GIL).
src/metaljax/engine.py        ── compile: deserialize + wrap Interpreter
  │                              execute: run on device buffers
  ▼
src/metaljax/interpreter.py   ── walks the StableHLO module op by op
  │  + src/metaljax/ops/*     ── one handler per op family
  ▼
mlx.core                      ── lazy Metal arrays; unified memory

• The dylib implements PJRT API v0.114 (plugin/vendor/pjrt_c_api.h, vendored at jaxlib's exact openxla/xla pin).
• Registration happens through the jax_plugins namespace package (src/jax_plugins/metal/), at priority −1: CPU stays the default backend unless you opt in via JAX_PLATFORMS.

Requirements

• Apple-silicon Mac (developed on an M5 Max, macOS 26.5, Xcode 26.6 — any arm64 Mac with a recent Xcode/CLT should work).
• uv (only for creating the venv).
• Python 3.14 and jax/jaxlib 0.11.x (what the venv setup below installs; the vendored PJRT header matches jaxlib 0.11.0).

Developing from source

git clone https://github.com/eterevsky/metaljax && cd metaljax
uv venv --python 3.14 .venv
uv pip install -p .venv/bin/python jax mlx numpy pytest
uv pip install -p .venv/bin/python -e .
./plugin/build.sh          # builds plugin/build/libmetal_pjrt.dylib (clang)

Verify:

JAX_PLATFORMS=metal .venv/bin/python -c "import jax; print(jax.devices())"

should print [MetalDevice(id=0)].

Running the tests

The pytest suite lowers each construct with jax.jit(...).lower(), runs the StableHLO module through the interpreter on the GPU, and compares against the JAX CPU backend (this exercises the interpreter directly and does not need the plugin dylib):

.venv/bin/python -m pytest tests/ -q

Current suite: 129 tests across elementwise/transcendental ops, shapes and broadcasting, dot_general/einsum, reductions and cumulative ops, control flow (while/cond/scan), gather/scatter, RNG, and bf16/f16/x64 dtype handling.

End-to-end smoke test through the real plugin (device buffers, compile, execute, PJRT events):

JAX_PLATFORMS=metal .venv/bin/python -c "
import jax, jax.numpy as jnp
g = jax.jit(jax.grad(lambda x: jnp.sum(jnp.tanh(x) ** 2)))(jnp.arange(4.0))
print(g, g.device)"

Coverage and known gaps

Running the test suite of the exact jax release we pin (v0.11.0) executes ~27,800 tests with 99.53% passing (27,649 passed / 130 failed). Every remaining failure has been individually examined and classified with evidence (notes/jax-test-suite-2026-07.md); they fall into three groups:

Intentional (platform constraints, will not change):

• No float64. Metal GPUs have no f64 ALUs. f64 values may pass through the device (stored as f32), but f64 compute fails at compile time naming the op; METALJAX_F64=downcast opts into f32 emulation. Keep jax_enable_x64 off. Same policy for complex128.
• One physical device. pmap/shard_map/collectives work on a single device (replica groups of size 1); actual multi-device sharding has no hardware to run on.
• Denormals flush to zero on the GPU (hardware behavior); tests asserting subnormal outputs (e.g. jnp.spacing) differ from CPU.
• Complex special values at inf/NaN poles for a handful of transcendentals (log/trig/hyperbolic family) follow MLX's kernel semantics rather than C99. Finite inputs match CPU; full C99 pole behavior would need per-element branches in hot paths (policy: not worth the slowdown). sqrt/rsqrt/exp/expm1/tan/abs/sign are rebuilt and exact.

Remaining audited gaps (every one re-examined during the 0.11.0 parity campaign and approved as-is; each carries evidence in notes/jax-test-suite-2026-07.md):

• Ordered-effect residue (~3): buffer_callback and emit_python_callback are rejected by jax-side platform allowlists (callback.py, buffer_callback.py hard-code cpu/cuda/rocm/tpu) — not reachable from a plugin; verified passing on CPU because cpu is inside those hard-coded lists. Ordered debug.print/io_callback work.
• testSincInfinities, FD-reference gradient corners: fail on the CPU backend too, or the test's finite-difference reference is numerically meaningless in f32 (documented with numbers).
• Better-than-reference cases (4): shape-polymorphic jnp.insert / jnp.nonzero — the harness asserts NotImplementedError because jax's CPU path cannot lower them; ours can, and values match CPU on concrete shapes. We fail these tests by succeeding.
• test_dce_sink_prevents_xla_dce: needs optimized-HLO text retrieval (PJRT_Executable_OptimizedProgram), a debugging surface we have not implemented.

Supported (each verified against the CPU backend): sorting (sort/argsort/top_k/approx_top_k/median/percentile/ unique, key-value and multi-key lexicographic sorts — jnp.lexsort, unique(axis=), set operations — IEEE total-order NaN handling, complex lexicographic order); convolutions (1/2/3-D float, integer — exact, and complex; strided, dilated, grouped, transposed, and their gradients); the full scatter family (windowed, out-of-bounds-dropping, arbitrary elementwise bodies); general reduce/reduce_window bodies and pooling with gradients (select_and_scatter, select_and_gather_add); complex64 end-to-end (arithmetic, FFT, linalg); linear algebra via LAPACK semantics on the host (QR, eigh, eig, SVD, LU, Cholesky, triangular_solve, Schur, Hessenberg — CPU-bound in every backend, free on unified memory) — including bfloat16/float16 inputs, which jax's CPU backend itself rejects (computed in f32, results in the requested dtype); single-device pmap/shard_map with the full collective set; rng_bit_generator (Philox and ThreeFry, bit-exact vs CPU, so the rbg/unsafe_rbg PRNG implementations work); int4/uint4 and all float8 dtypes (emulated: exact values in wider storage, grid-quantized converts, 4-bit wraparound); host callbacks (jax.debug.print, pure_callback, io_callback); shape-polymorphic jax.export of all of the above; popcnt/count_leading_zeros; sparse (BCOO/BCSR) workloads.

Behavioral differences under investigation are tracked in the notes file above. Unsupported constructs fail loudly at compile time with the op named — nothing silently falls back to CPU or returns wrong dtypes.

Using metaljax from another project

Add metaljax to your dependencies (it declares jax itself):

[project]
dependencies = ["metaljax"]

and set JAX_PLATFORMS=metal (or jax.config.update("jax_platforms", "metal") before first use).

To develop against a local checkout instead, use a path source:

[tool.uv.sources]
metaljax = { path = "../metaljax", editable = true }

(with an editable install, build the plugin once in the checkout via ./plugin/build.sh). A git source (metaljax = { git = "https://github.com/eterevsky/metaljax" }) works too; like sdist installs it compiles the plugin during the build, which needs the Xcode command-line tools.

Environment variables

Repository layout

CLAUDE.md                  project decisions/status (kept current)
pyproject.toml             python package + jax_plugins entry point
src/metaljax/
  interpreter.py           StableHLO walker (SSA env, blocks, funcs)
  ops/                     op handlers: elementwise, shape, linalg,
                           reduction, control, gather
  engine.py                PJRT-facing compile/execute/buffer layer
  dtypes.py, _ir.py        dtype tables, MLIR context & attr decoding
src/jax_plugins/metal/     backend registration (priority -1)
plugin/
  metal_pjrt.cc            the PJRT C-API dylib (no deps, ~1100 lines)
  vendor/pjrt_c_api.h      vendored PJRT header (API 0.114)
  build.sh                 clang build → plugin/build/libmetal_pjrt.dylib
tests/                     pytest suite (Metal vs CPU)
scripts/                   benchmark & training drivers

Benchmarks

Full training steps (fwd + bwd + AdamW), f32, M5 Max, via scripts/bench_compare.py (16 timed steps after warmup):

¹ torch uses its hand-fused nn.GRU kernel; metaljax generates its kernel from the StableHLO loop body and lands within 10%.

How: pure programs and counted-loop (scan/fori_loop) bodies are traced once through mx.compile and replayed as fused Metal graphs; small statically-counted loops are unrolled into the enclosing trace, so e.g. a whole recurrent-model training step (forward scan + backward + AdamW) becomes a single graph replay. On top of that, recurrent scan bodies that pattern-match as elementwise/matvec cells (rnn/gru/mgru/lrnn/rglru family — forward and the AD-generated backward loop) compile to a single generated persistent Metal kernel: the whole scan is one kernel launch, with state in registers (small cells), register-block lanes (small block matvecs, in-lane reductions, and narrow rectangular readouts — the lrnn family), or one threadgroup per batch element with the feature dim as the thread axis (full-width cells like gru.256, including rectangular fused-gate dots like mullstm.32). Very wide cells (gru.1024-class) deliberately stay on the compiled-graph path, where batched matmul wins. Weight-gradient accumulations are handled by loop fission: the kernel stacks per-step operands and the einsum runs as one batched matmul after it. METALJAX_COMPILE=0 disables compilation, METALJAX_MSL=0 disables kernel codegen, METALJAX_TRACE_BUDGET (default 20000 ops) caps trace sizes, and METALJAX_DEBUG=1 logs loop/compile decisions.

On a 104-config language-model training suite (dense, GRU/LSTM-family, and linear-RNN cells from tens of weights to several million), 84 configs train faster on metal than on the M5's CPU cores; every config above 10k weights wins (median 3–6.6x faster), and 41 of 104 outpace an RTX 4090 running jax-CUDA. Only sub-10k-weight models remain CPU territory (kernel-dispatch floor). Every optimization is gated by a whole-model correctness sweep: one jitted training chunk per suite config executed on both backends from identical inputs, every output leaf compared.

openxla/xla benchmark suite

The single-device benchmarks from xla/tools/benchmarks (HLO converted to StableHLO with xla-translate, run via scripts/run_stablehlo_bench.py; ms per call, identical seeded inputs, outputs cross-checked against the CPU results):

¹ exceeds the 4090's 24 GB VRAM; the M5's 128 GB unified memory runs gemma3_12b (23.5 GB of bf16 weights) where the discrete GPU cannot. ² compiled whole-graph after working around an MLX limitation (equal constant-valued outputs break mx.compile); ~10× CPU.

Correctness vs CPU on identical inputs: gemma2/gemma4 outputs bit-exact; the gemma3 family diverges ≤3.6% in bf16 KV-cache tensors (a few bf16 ULPs across 26+ layers) — the 4090 shows the same divergence class vs CPU (≤4.2%), so that's cross-backend bf16 numerics, not a backend bug.

Gemma 4 end-to-end inference

Real LLM inference through unmodified JAX code: google/gemma-4-12B-it and google/gemma-4-31B-it (HF safetensors mapped into DeepMind's gemma library, greedy ChatSampler, batch 1, ~40-token prompt, 218–275 generated tokens). decode is the steady-state warm rate; warmup is the one-time first-generation overhead (jax tracing + metaljax compile + Metal kernel builds), measured as cold minus warm generation time. Memory is device-active for metaljax, weight footprint for CPU.

¹ f32 weights alone are 122.8 GB: metaljax loads them but decode — which streams every weight byte per token — pages a 128 GB machine into the ground (the CPU attempt took the whole OS with it). bf16 is the only way to run the 31B locally; bf16 on the CPU backend is omitted because XLA:CPU upcasts bf16 matmuls to f32 internally.

Single-token decode is the worst case for a Python interpreter: ~120 ms/token of the metal rows is dtype-independent host-side dispatch (measured via process-CPU vs wall time), which is why f32 costs only 1.34× bf16 rather than the 2× that pure bandwidth would predict. That overhead is the target of the planned native replay engine.

Known limitations

Three platform constraints are permanent (detailed under Coverage and known gaps above): no float64 or complex128 compute (pass-through is fine; METALJAX_F64=downcast emulates in f32), one physical device (single-device pmap/shard_map/collectives work; real multi-device sharding has no hardware), and denormals flushing to zero on the GPU. Everything else still open is itemized in the "Under review" list above.

Performance, not correctness:

• Scan bodies that don't fit the kernel-codegen patterns (gather/scatter in the loop, non-affine indexing, bodies exceeding the trace or binding budgets) fall back to per-timestep compiled-graph replay, which pays per-step dispatch.
• Buffer donation is honoured (donate_argnums invalidates the donated inputs, matching other backends), but MLX cannot write outputs into the donated memory in place — the win is prompt buffer release rather than CUDA-style aliasing.

License / provenance

Experimental personal project; builds against public JAX/OpenXLA (PJRT header vendored from openxla/xla) and Apple's MLX.