vllm-mlx

Continuous batching + OpenAI + Anthropic APIs in one server. Native Apple Silicon inference.

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What is vllm-mlx?

A vLLM-style inference server for Apple Silicon Macs. Unlike Ollama or mlx-lm used directly, it ships continuous batching, paged KV cache, prefix caching, and SSD-tiered cache, and exposes both OpenAI /v1/* and Anthropic /v1/messages from a single process. Run LLMs, vision models, audio, and embeddings on Metal with unified memory, no conversion step.

Quick start

New users: follow the isolated release install and first-response check. The example below assumes that environment is activated. Initial model download/loading time depends on the machine and connection.

The version below is this walkthrough's pinned reference release, not an automatically updated latest version.

python -m pip install 'vllm-mlx==0.4.1'
vllm-mlx serve mlx-community/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-4bit --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000

After the first response, restart with --continuous-batching to try continuous batching and its cache options. The minimal command above uses the default engine without that flag.

OpenAI SDK:

Install openai in your Python client environment first; it is not installed by the server package. See the client setup.

from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1", api_key="not-needed")
r = client.chat.completions.create(model="mlx-community/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-4bit", messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hi!"}])
print(r.choices[0].message.content)

Anthropic SDK / Claude Code:

export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8000
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=not-needed
claude

Coding CLI compatibility

Validated with OpenCode, pi, Codex, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, Cline CLI, and OpenClaw's embedded agent. All seven completed a streamed tool interaction and an exact file edit in one local run with Qwen3.8-27B-4bit on September 19, 2026. Results apply to the tested client versions and settings.

See the validated CLI matrix and setup guide for versions, API transports, reproduction commands, and coverage limits.

Features

APIs

• OpenAI-compatible: /v1/chat/completions, /v1/completions, /v1/embeddings, /v1/rerank, /v1/responses
• Anthropic-compatible: /v1/messages (streaming, tool use, system prompts)
• MCP Tool Calling: 19 parsers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Qwen, DeepSeek, Gemma, and more)
• Structured output: JSON Schema via response_format (lm-format-enforcer)

Throughput & memory

• Continuous batching: high throughput for concurrent requests
• Paged KV cache: memory-efficient with prefix sharing
• SSD-tiered KV cache: spill prefix cache to disk for long-context agents (--ssd-cache-dir)
• Warm prompts: preload popular prefixes at startup (--warm-prompts) for 1.3-2.25x TTFT
• Prefix cache: trie-based, shared across requests

Multimodal

• Text + image + video + audio from one server
• Vision models: Gemma 3, Gemma 4, Qwen3-VL, Pixtral, Llama vision
• Audio input in chat (audio_url content blocks)
• Native TTS: 11 voices, 15+ languages (Kokoro, Chatterbox, VibeVoice, VoxCPM)
• STT: Whisper family with RTF up to 197x on M4 Max

Reasoning & advanced

• Reasoning extraction: Qwen3 and DeepSeek-R1 parsers (--reasoning-parser)
• MoE expert reduction: --moe-top-k for +7-16% on Qwen3-30B-A3B
• Speculative decoding: --enable-mtp for supported models
• Sparse prefill: attention-based --specprefill for supported model/draft combinations

Observability

• Prometheus metrics: /metrics endpoint with --enable-metrics
• Built-in benchmarker: vllm-mlx bench-serve for prompt sweeps with CSV/JSON output

Native GPU acceleration

• Apple Silicon only (M1, M2, M3, M4, M5) with Metal kernels via MLX
• Unified memory, no model conversion

Performance

LLM decode (M4 Max, 128 GB, greedy, single stream):

Audio speech-to-text (M4 Max, RTF = real-time factor):

See docs/benchmarks/ for continuous-batching results, KV-cache quantization (4-bit / 8-bit / fp16), and MoE top-k sweeps.

Examples

Anthropic API (Claude Code, OpenCode)

vllm-mlx serve mlx-community/Qwen3-8B-4bit --port 8000
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8000
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=not-needed
claude

Reasoning models (Qwen3, DeepSeek-R1)

vllm-mlx serve mlx-community/Qwen3-8B-4bit --reasoning-parser qwen3

r = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="mlx-community/Qwen3-8B-4bit",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What is 17 * 23?"}],
)
print("Thinking:", r.choices[0].message.reasoning)
print("Answer:",   r.choices[0].message.content)

Multimodal (image + text)

vllm-mlx serve mlx-community/Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct-3bit --port 8000

r = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="mlx-community/Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct-3bit",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": [
        {"type": "text", "text": "What is in this image?"},
        {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": "https://example.com/cat.jpg"}},
    ]}],
)

Structured output (JSON Schema)

With the text server from the quick start:

r = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="mlx-community/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-4bit",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "List 3 colors."}],
    response_format={
        "type": "json_schema",
        "json_schema": {
            "schema": {"type": "object", "properties": {"colors": {"type": "array", "items": {"type": "string"}}}}
        },
    },
)

Reranking (/v1/rerank)

curl http://localhost:8000/v1/rerank -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{
  "model": "default",
  "query": "apple silicon inference",
  "documents": ["MLX is Apples framework", "Metal kernels on M-series", "CUDA on NVIDIA"]
}'

The built-in MLX reranker forward path supports standard BERT/XLM-RoBERTa sequence-classification weights with gelu, gelu_new/gelu_fast, relu, or silu/swish hidden_act values. Other activations fail explicitly so custom reranker architectures can add a dedicated adapter instead of silently using the wrong activation.

Embeddings

vllm-mlx serve <llm-model> --embedding-model mlx-community/all-MiniLM-L6-v2-4bit

emb = client.embeddings.create(model="mlx-community/all-MiniLM-L6-v2-4bit", input=["Hello", "World"])

Audio (TTS / STT)

pip install vllm-mlx[audio]
brew install espeak-ng        # macOS, needed for non-English TTS

python examples/tts_example.py "Hello, how are you?" --play
python examples/tts_multilingual.py "Hola mundo" --lang es --play

Built-in benchmarking

vllm-mlx bench-serve --url http://localhost:8000 --concurrency 5 --prompts prompts.txt --output results.csv

# Product-style workload with quality checks and metrics deltas
vllm-mlx bench-serve --url http://localhost:8000 --workload workload.json --repetitions 5 --output results.json

# Append workload rows into SQLite for longitudinal comparisons
vllm-mlx bench-serve --url http://localhost:8000 --workload workload.json --repetitions 5 --format sqlite --output bench.db

Model acquisition and conversion

# Inspect repo metadata, file sizes, config, and rough fit before downloading weights
vllm-mlx model inspect mlx-community/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-4bit

# Acquire with resumable Hugging Face transfer and write a local artifact manifest
vllm-mlx model acquire mlx-community/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-4bit --target-dir ./models/llama-3b-4bit

# Wrap mlx-lm conversion and record the exact recipe in the converted artifact
vllm-mlx model convert meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct --output ./models/llama-3b-mlx-q4 --quantize --q-bits 4 --q-group-size 64 --q-mode affine

Prometheus metrics

vllm-mlx serve <model> --enable-metrics
curl http://localhost:8000/metrics

Installation

Use the release walkthrough for an isolated environment and a pinned server version. If you already manage CLI tools with uv, its isolated equivalent is:

uv tool install 'vllm-mlx==0.4.1'

Keep development checkouts separate. See the Installation Guide for optional extras and Audio Guide for audio setup.

Documentation

Browse the complete documentation at vllm-mlx.is-a.dev.

• Getting started: Installation · Quick Start
• Servers & APIs: OpenAI server · Anthropic Messages API · Python API
• Client compatibility: Run coding-client acceptance checks
• Features: Multimodal · Audio · Embeddings · Reasoning · MCP & Tool Calling · Tool Parsers
• Performance: Continuous Batching · Multi-Model Serving · Warm Prompts · MoE Top-K
• Reference: CLI · Models · Configuration
• Benchmarks: LLM · Image · Video · Audio

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                           vllm-mlx Server                               │
│   OpenAI /v1/*  ·  Anthropic /v1/messages  ·  /v1/rerank  ·  /metrics   │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                                   │
                                   ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Continuous batching · Paged KV cache · Prefix cache · SSD tiering      │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                                   │
        ┌─────────────┬────────────┴────────────┬─────────────┐
        ▼             ▼                         ▼             ▼
┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐
│    mlx-lm     │ │   mlx-vlm     │ │   mlx-audio   │ │mlx-embeddings │
│    (LLMs)     │ │  (Vision)     │ │  (TTS + STT)  │ │ (Embeddings)  │
└───────────────┘ └───────────────┘ └───────────────┘ └───────────────┘
                                   │
                                   ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                   MLX · Metal kernels · Unified memory                  │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Contributing

Bug fixes, perf work, docs, and benchmarks on different Apple Silicon chips all welcome. See the Contributing Guide.

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.

Citation

@software{vllm_mlx2025,
  author = {Barrios, Wayner},
  title  = {vllm-mlx: Apple Silicon MLX Backend for vLLM},
  year   = {2025},
  url    = {https://github.com/waybarrios/vllm-mlx},
  note   = {Native GPU-accelerated LLM and vision-language model inference on Apple Silicon}
}

Acknowledgments

• MLX. Apple's ML framework.
• mlx-lm. LLM inference library.
• mlx-vlm. Vision-language models.
• mlx-audio. Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text.
• mlx-embeddings. Text embeddings.
• Rapid-MLX. Community fork of vllm-mlx.
• vLLM. High-throughput LLM serving. vllm-mlx is inspired by vLLM and adopts its continuous-batching and paged KV-cache design for Apple Silicon via MLX.

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