Red Hat AI Inference 3.5 EA2 Release notes
Highlights of what is new and what has changed with this Red Hat AI Inference release
Abstract
Chapter 1. Red Hat AI Inference release notes
Red Hat AI Inference provides developers and IT organizations with a scalable inference platform for deploying and customizing AI models on secure, scalable resources with minimal configuration and resource usage.
These release notes document new features, enhancements, bug fixes, known issues, and deprecated functionality for each Red Hat AI Inference release. Security advisories and asynchronous errata updates are published separately as container images become available.
Chapter 2. Version 3.5.0-ea.2 release notes
Red Hat AI Inference 3.5.0-ea.2 provides container images that optimize inferencing with large language models (LLMs) for NVIDIA CUDA, AMD ROCm, Google TPU, Intel Gaudi, and IBM Spyre AI accelerators with multi-architecture support for s390x (IBM Z) and ppc64le (IBM Power).
Red Hat AI Inference 3.5.0-ea.2 is an Early Access release. Early Access releases are not supported by Red Hat in any way and are not functionally complete or production-ready. Do not use Early Access releases for production or business-critical workloads. Use Early Access releases to test upcoming product features in advance of their possible inclusion in a Red Hat product offering, and to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process. These features might not have any documentation, are subject to change or removal at any time, and testing is limited. Red Hat might provide ways to submit feedback on Early Access features without an associated SLA.
The following container images are available as early access releases from Content from registry.redhat.io is not included.registry.redhat.io:
-
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-cuda-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.2 -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-rocm-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.2 -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-spyre-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.2(s390x, ppc64le, x86_64) -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/model-opt-cuda-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.2 -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-cpu-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.2
The following container images are Technology Preview features:
-
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-tpu-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.2 -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-neuron-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.2 -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-gaudi-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.2
Technology Preview features are not supported with Red Hat production service level agreements (SLAs) and might not be functionally complete. Red Hat does not recommend using them in production. These features provide early access to upcoming product features, enabling customers to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process.
For more information about the support scope of Red Hat Technology Preview features, see Technology Preview Features Support Scope.
This release expands the supported product and hardware configurations. For more information, see Supported product and hardware configurations.
The following Technology Preview container images bundle different upstream vLLM versions:
-
vllm-tpu-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.2bundles vLLM v0.13.0. -
vllm-neuron-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.2bundles vLLM v0.16.0. -
vllm-gaudi-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.2bundles vLLM v0.19.1.
2.1. New Red Hat AI Inference developer features
Red Hat AI Inference 3.5.0-ea.2 packages the upstream vLLM v0.21.0 release. You can review the complete list of updates in the upstream Content from github.com is not included.vLLM v0.21.0 release notes.
- AMD MI350P PCIe support
- Added support for AMD Instinct™ MI350P PCIe accelerators with ROCm™ 7.14. The MI350P brings the AMD CDNA™ 4 architecture to standard data center server infrastructure. Designed in a dual-slot PCIe form factor, the MI350P features configurable total board power of up to 600 W and passive air cooling. This enables integration into enterprise data centers without major power or cooling infrastructure changes. It supports traditional 16-bit and 8-bit data formats, as well as MXFP6 and MXFP4 for efficient model serving, and includes 144 GB of HBM3E memory with up to 4.0 TB/s of peak memory bandwidth.
- IBM Power supported models
The following models are supported on IBM Power (ppc64le) architecture:
-
mistralai/Mistral-small-3.2-24B-instruct-2506 -
intfloat/multilingual-e5-large -
intfloat/multilingual-e5-large-instruct -
ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b-fp8 -
meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8b-instruct, including fine-tuned models and custom weights
-
- Batch inference with the OpenAI-compatible Batches API in llm-d (Technology Preview)
-
Distributed Inference with llm-d supports batch inference through the OpenAI-compatible
/v1/batchesAPI. You can submit large volumes of requests asynchronously and retrieve results on your own schedule without maintaining an active connection. The scheduler runs batch workloads during periods of low cluster activity at a lower priority than real-time traffic, so that live user SLAs are never affected.
- End-to-end distributed tracing for llm-d (Developer Preview)
- Platform operators can trace distributed inference requests end-to-end across service boundaries by using OpenTelemetry-compatible distributed tracing. Traces correlate latency and errors across the full request path, from the gateway through the router-scheduler to model servers.
2.2. New Red Hat AI Model Optimization Toolkit developer features
Red Hat AI Model Optimization Toolkit 3.5.0-ea.2 packages the upstream LLM Compressor v0.10.0.2 release. You can review the complete list of updates in the upstream Content from github.com is not included.LLM Compressor v0.10.0.2 release notes.
2.3. Red Hat AI Omni Inference Container (Developer Preview)
Red Hat AI Omni Inference Container provides developers and IT organizations with a scalable inference platform for deploying and customizing omni-modality (text, audio, image) AI models on secure, scalable resources with minimal configuration and efficient resource usage.
Red Hat AI Omni Inference Container provides container images that optimize inference with omni-modality generative AI models for NVIDIA CUDA.
Container images
The following container image is Developer Preview from quay.io:
-
quay.io/vllm/vllm-omni-cuda:0.22.0_rhaiv.1
Supported models
Red Hat AI Omni Inference Container offers official support for the following model collections:
| Model | Size | Input modalities | Output modalities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3-Omni | 63.4 - 70.5 GB | Text, Audio, Image, Video | Text, Audio |
| FLUX.2 | 23.7 - 178 GB | Text, Image | Image |
| Qwen-TTS | 2.5 - 4.5 GB | Text | Audio |
| Voxtral-TTS | 0.6 - 16 GB | Text | Audio |
Developer features
- Tensor parallelism
Tensor parallelism shards the weights of each model layer across multiple GPUs to reduce memory pressure and increase throughput. This technique is specifically intended for large models with massive layers, such as autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Transformers (DiTs).
For multi-stage models, the best approach is typically using stage configurations to distribute different stages across different physical devices. However, you can also combine these strategies: if a multi-stage model (such as Qwen3-Omni) contains an exceptionally large individual stage, you can still apply tensor parallelism within that specific stage while allocating the remaining, smaller stages to separate devices.
For detailed configuration steps and syntax, refer to the upstream documentation for Content from docs.vllm.ai is not included.tensor parallelism and Content from docs.vllm.ai is not included.stage configurations.
- Model CPU offload
CPU offload is a serving configuration that stores model weights in system memory, only loading them into GPU VRAM as they are needed for a model forward pass. This trades server performance for GPU memory pressure, allowing GPUs to serve models that are larger than their available VRAM.
This feature is strictly supported for diffusion workloads such as DiT models. It cannot be used with multi-stage Autoregressive (AR) pipelines such as Qwen3-Omni or Qwen3-TTS.
- Cache-DiT
Cache-DiT is an inference optimization algorithm for diffusion pipelines that skips certain low-impact computations to trade output quality for throughput.
For more fine-grained configuration of Cache-DiT, refer to the Content from docs.vllm.ai is not included.upstream documentation.
- Prometheus metrics
Prometheus metrics are signals a server provides about its own performance and load to outside observers for autoscaling and monitoring purposes.
For more metrics configuration, refer to the Content from docs.vllm.ai is not included.upstream documentation.
- CFG parallel
With Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) Parallel, you can distribute the forward passes through the diffusion transformer for standard CFG, such as positive versus negative or empty prompts, across multiple GPUs. This is a diffusion-only feature.
For more information, refer to the Content from docs.vllm.ai is not included.upstream documentation.
Red Hat AI Omni Inference Container is a Developer Preview feature only. Developer Preview features are not supported by Red Hat in any way and are not functionally complete or production-ready. Do not use Developer Preview features for production or business-critical workloads. Developer Preview features provide early access to upcoming product features in advance of their possible inclusion in a Red Hat product offering, enabling customers to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process. These features might not have any documentation, are subject to change or removal at any time, and testing is limited. Red Hat might provide ways to submit feedback on Developer Preview features without an associated SLA.
2.4. Resolved issues
Structured output generation on IBM Z with llguidance backend now works correctly.
Previously, when using the llguidance structured decoding backend on IBM Z (s390x), JSON Schema-constrained generation produced invalid output or became stuck generating whitespace indefinitely. This issue is now resolved.
Sarvam-105B model now loads successfully.
Previously, the
RedHatAI/sarvam-105b-FP8-Dynamicmodel failed to load due to a RoPE validation error caused by a Transformers v5 incompatibility. This issue is now resolved.
2.5. Known issues
Prithvi TerraTorch model warmup fails on arm64 GH200 due to tensor size limit.
When deploying the
ibm-nasa-geospatial/Prithvi-EO-2.0-300M-TL-Sen1Floods11model on arm64 NVIDIA GH200 accelerators, the vLLM engine core fails during warmup with the error "upsample_bilinear2d_nhwc only supports output tensors with less than INT_MAX elements". A PyTorch CUDA kernel limitation on arm64 causes this issue when the TerraTorch UPerNet decoder warmup tensor exceeds the signed 32-bit integer maximum.To work around this issue, deploy the model with limited concurrency:
--max-num-seqs=8 --max-num-batched-tokens=8
This configuration does not affect performance for geospatial models because each request uses only one token.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash-NVFP4-FP8 model crashes during initialization.
The
RedHatAI/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-NVFP4-FP8quantized model fails to load with aKeyErrorforscale_fmtin the quantization configuration. The DeepseekV4Attention initialization expects ascale_fmtkey that is not present in the model configuration.
Mistral Small 3.1 tool calling returns no tool calls with
tool_choice=auto.When using the Mistral Small 3.1 model with tool calling and
tool_choice=auto, the model does not return tool calls in the response.
Qwen2.5-VL FP8 tool calling fails because the model does not support tools.
The Qwen2.5-VL FP8 model fails tool calling smoke tests because the model architecture does not support tool calling functionality.
Mistral Small FP8-dynamic fails to start due to missing backend attribute.
The Mistral Small FP8-dynamic model fails to start with an error indicating that
CachedMistralCommonBackendis missing theis_fastattribute.
Gemma 4 12B model evaluation crashes due to batch token limit.
When running LM Evaluation Harness on the Gemma 4 12B model, the evaluation crashes with an error indicating that
max_num_batched_tokensis too small for the prefix-LM multimodal model.To work around this issue, explicitly set
--max-num-batched-tokensto any value greater than 2496:--max-num-batched-tokens 4096
Granite 4.0-h-small model crashes on first inference with ROCm.
When deploying the
ibm-granite/granite-4.0-h-smallmodel on AMD ROCm accelerators, the vLLM server crashes during the first inference request with aRuntimeError: PassManager::run failederror. This occurs because the Triton JIT compiler fails to compile Mamba chunk_scan kernels on the first run. After the pod restarts, the model works correctly due to the warm compilation cache.
Qwen 3.5 and 3.6 models fail on CPU deployments.
Qwen 3.5 and 3.6 models fail to run correctly on CPU-only deployments due to an upstream vLLM issue with GDN attention operations.
Intel Gaudi deployments fail due to habana-torch-plugin version rejection.
When deploying models on Intel Gaudi accelerators, the vllm-gaudi configuration validation rejects the
habana-torch-pluginversion1.23.0.post1because it does not conform to PEP 440 versioning requirements.
Prefix caching with models requiring transformers 5.x crashes the inference scheduler.
Deploying models whose architecture was introduced in transformers 5.0 or later with prefix caching enabled (
precise-prefix-cache-scorer) causes the inference scheduler to crash. The tokenizer sidecar (odh-llm-d-kv-cache-rhel9) ships transformers 4.57.6, which does not recognize architecture types added in transformers 5.x. Affected models include Gemma 4, GLM-5, Qwen3.5 MoE, and others added after the 4.x series.To work around this issue, disable
precise-prefix-cache-scorerin theEndpointPickerConfigwhen using these models.This issue is fixed in 3.5 stable. The UDS tokenizer sidecar is replaced by a vLLM render sidecar that stays in sync with the serving image’s transformers version.
Chapter 3. Version 3.5.0-ea.1 release notes
Red Hat AI Inference 3.5.0-ea.1 provides container images that optimize inferencing with large language models (LLMs) for NVIDIA CUDA, AMD ROCm, Google TPU, Intel Gaudi, and IBM Spyre AI accelerators with multi-architecture support for s390x (IBM Z) and ppc64le (IBM Power).
Red Hat AI Inference 3.5.0-ea.1 is an Early Access release. Early Access releases are not supported by Red Hat in any way and are not functionally complete or production-ready. Do not use Early Access releases for production or business-critical workloads. Use Early Access releases to test upcoming product features in advance of their possible inclusion in a Red Hat product offering, and to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process. These features might not have any documentation, are subject to change or removal at any time, and testing is limited. Red Hat might provide ways to submit feedback on Early Access features without an associated SLA.
The following container images are available as early access releases from Content from registry.redhat.io is not included.registry.redhat.io:
-
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-cuda-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.1 -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-rocm-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.1 -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-spyre-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.1-1781067361(s390x, ppc64le, x86_64) -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-spyre-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.1-1780065632(s390x, ppc64le, x86_64) — for Red Hat OpenShift AI compatibility -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/model-opt-cuda-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.1 -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-cpu-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.1
The following container images are Technology Preview features:
-
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-tpu-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.1 -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-neuron-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.1 -
registry.redhat.io/rhaii-early-access/vllm-gaudi-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.1
Technology Preview features are not supported with Red Hat production service level agreements (SLAs) and might not be functionally complete. Red Hat does not recommend using them in production. These features provide early access to upcoming product features, enabling customers to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process.
For more information about the support scope of Red Hat Technology Preview features, see Technology Preview Features Support Scope.
The Red Hat AI Inference supported product and hardware configurations have been expanded. For more information, see Supported product and hardware configurations.
The following Technology Preview container images bundle different upstream vLLM versions:
-
vllm-tpu-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.1bundles vLLM v0.13.0. -
vllm-neuron-rhel9:3.5.0-ea.1bundles vLLM v0.16.0.
3.1. New Red Hat AI Inference developer features
Red Hat AI Inference 3.5.0-ea.1 packages the upstream vLLM v0.19.1 release. You can review the complete list of updates in the upstream Content from github.com is not included.vLLM v0.19.1 release notes.
- Gemma 4 model support
Added support for the
RedHatAI/gemma-4-26B-ITandRedHatAI/gemma-4-12B-ITmodels.To use custom tool calling, add the template from the upstream vLLM repository or use the chat template from the Hugging Face model repository. The custom tool-calling template is not included in the container image.
- New model support
-
Added support for
Mistral-small-3.2-24B-instruct-2506,multilingual-e5-large,multilingual-e5-large-instruct, andgranite-4-8b-densemodel architectures. - Custom weights support for Llama 3.1
-
Added support for
Llama-3.1-8b-instruct, including fine-tuned models and custom weights. - IBM Z supported models
Added support for the following models on IBM Z (s390x) architecture:
-
ibm-granite/granite-3.3-8b-instruct -
ibm-granite/granite-3.3-8b-instruct-FP8 -
ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b -
ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b-fp8 -
mistralai/Ministral-3-14B-Instruct-2512-BF16
-
- Model support matrix
This release adds a comprehensive model support matrix to the documentation. Validated models are benchmarked with GuideLLM and LM Evaluation Harness. Enabled models are architecturally supported, but not yet through the full validation pipeline. The matrix lists supported models detailing the following information:
- Validation status
- Minimum Red Hat AI Inference platform
- Minimum Red Hat OpenShift AI version
- vLLM version
- ModelCar container image registry paths
- GPU requirements, including minimum vRAM and supported GPU configurations
For more information, see Validated models.
- Speculators library update (Technology Preview)
- Updated the Speculators library to version 0.5.0a0.
3.2. New Red Hat AI Model Optimization Toolkit developer features
Red Hat AI Model Optimization Toolkit 3.5.0-ea.1 packages the upstream LLM Compressor v0.10.0.2 release. You can review the complete list of updates in the upstream Content from github.com is not included.LLM Compressor v0.10.0.2 release notes.
3.3. Known issues
AMD ROCm deployments on MI300X encounter memory access faults during CUDA graph capture.
When running models such as
meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B-Instructoribm-granite/granite-3.2-2b-instructon AMD MI300X accelerators, GPU memory access faults occur with the error "Memory access fault by GPU node-2". This issue is caused by an incompatibility between vLLM CUDA Graph FULL mode and MI300X VF memory behavior under ROCm.To work around this issue, set
cudagraph_mode=PIECEWISEin your vLLM configuration:--compilation-config '{"cudagraph_mode":"PIECEWISE"}'
Phi-4 Vision model fails to load with SigLIP2 compatibility error.
The
RedHatAI/Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15Bmodel requires afilter_out_non_signature_kwargs()function that is missing from thetransformerslibrary bundled with vLLM. The vLLM API server crashes at startup and cannot serve the model.
Sarvam-105B model fails to load with RoPE validation error.
The
RedHatAI/sarvam-105b-FP8-Dynamicmodel configuration callsvalidate_rope(ignore_keys=…), but theignore_keysparameter was removed in Transformers v5. The vLLM API server crashes during model initialization.
AMD Zen CPU deployments crash due to zentorch plugin incompatibility.
The zentorch vLLM plugin supports vLLM versions 0.15.0 through 0.18.0, but Red Hat AI Inference 3.5.0-ea.1 ships vLLM 0.19.1. The engine crashes during model loading with a segfault.
To work around this issue, unset the
VLLM_PLUGINSenvironment variable:unset VLLM_PLUGINS
Structured output generation fails on IBM Z when using the llguidance backend.
When using the llguidance structured decoding backend on IBM Z (s390x), JSON Schema-constrained generation may produce invalid output or become stuck generating whitespace indefinitely.
Gemma 4 12B model deployment might fail due to unsupported
gemma4_unifiedarchitecture in the bundled Transformers version.Gemma 4 12B models use the
gemma4_unifiedarchitecture, which is not supported by the version of Transformers included in the Red Hat AI Inference container image. Deployment of thegoogle/gemma-4-12B-itmodel fails during vLLM initialization with the error "The checkpoint you are trying to load has model typegemma4_unifiedbut Transformers does not recognize this architecture." Other Gemma 4 variants deploy successfully because they use different model architectures that are already supported.
Chapter 4. Asynchronous errata updates
Security, bug fix, and enhancement updates for Red Hat AI Inference are released as asynchronous errata through the Red Hat Network. All Red Hat AI Inference errata are available on the Red Hat Customer Portal. See the Red Hat AI Inference Life Cycle for more information about asynchronous errata.
You can enable errata notifications in your Red Hat Customer Portal account settings.
You must register your hosts and configure them for consuming Red Hat Customer Portal AI Inference entitlements for the errata notification emails to be generated.