Release Notes for NVIDIA NIM for LLMs#

This documentation contains the release notes for NVIDIA NIM for Large Language Models (LLMs).

Release 1.11.0#

Summary#

NVIDIA NIM for LLMs 1.11.0 introduces a multi-LLM compatible NIM container that enables you to deploy a wide variety of models from a single container.

To understand the changes introduced with this new LLM NIM option, take a look at the following pages:

Known Issues Fixed in 1.11.0#

The following are the previous known issues that were fixed in 1.11.0:

  • No known issues were fixed in this release.

New Known Issues in 1.11.0#

The following are the new known issues discovered in 1.11.0:

  • The Granite-3.3-2b-instruct model is not compatible with the TensorRT-LLM backend. This model can only be deployed using the SGLang or vLLM backends.

  • Guided Decoding might not work for Llama-3.3-70b-instruct with TensorRT-LLM backend.

  • Llama-3.3-nemotron-super-49b-v1 is only supported with TensorRT-LLM backend.

  • For llama-3.3-nemotron-super-49b-v1, Concurrent requests > 15 with detailed thinking on leads to a crash. Recommend using the LLM-specific NIM - llama-3.3-nemotron-super-49b-v1/tags

  • If sglang inference enters OOM at higher-workfloads, try setting NIM_KVCACHE_PERCENT to something lower than 0.85. sglang requires significantly more memory than other backends.

  • xgrammar guided decoding with sglang for NIM_TENSOR_PARALLEL_SIZE > 1 is not functioning as expected because of a known issue in xgrammar. Please restrict to NIM_TENSOR_PARALLEL_SIZE = 1 for sglang backend.

  • Models with nemo format checkpoints cannot be deployed.

  • If you see the RuntimeError of NCCL error: unhandled system error, increase the --shm-size to resolve the issue.

Previous Releases#

The following are links to the previous release notes.

1.10 | 1.8 | 1.7 | 1.6 | 1.5 |1.4 | 1.3 | 1.2 | 1.1 | 1.0

All Current Known Issues#

The following are the current (unfixed) known issues from all previous versions:

Tip

For related information, see Troubleshoot NVIDIA NIM for LLMs.

General#

  • The top_logprobs parameter is not supported.

  • All models return a 500 when setting logprobs=2, echo=true, and stream=false; they should return a 200.

  • Filenames should not contain spaces if a custom fine-tuned model directory is provided.

  • Some stop words might not work as expected and might appear in the output.

  • The maximum supported context length may decrease based on memory availability.

  • The structured generation of regular expressions results may have unexpected responses. We recommend that you provide a strict answer format, such as \\boxed{}, to get the correct response.

  • The model quantization is fp8, but the logs incorrectly display it as bf16.

Deployment and Environment#

  • Deploying with KServe can require changing permissions for the cache directory. See the Serving models from local assets section for details.

  • GH200 NVIDIA driver <560.35.03 can cause a segmentation fault or hanging during deployment. Fixed in GPU driver 560.35.03

  • Optimized engines (TRT-LLM) aren’t supported with NVIDIA vGPU. To use optimized engines, use GPU Passthrough.

  • Prompts with Unicode characters in the range from 0x0e0020 to 0x0e007f can produce unpredictable responses. NVIDIA recommends that you filter these characters out of prompts before submitting the prompt to an LLM.

  • The container may crash when building local TensorRT LLM engines if there isn’t enough host memory. If that happens, try setting NIM_LOW_MEMORY_MODE=1.

  • Out-of-Bounds (OOB) sequence length with tensorrt_llm-local_build is 8K. Use the NIM_MAX_MODEL_LEN environment variable to modify the sequence length within the range of values supported by a model.

  • NIM does not support Multi-instance GPU mode (MIG).

  • vGPU related issues:

    • trtllm_buildable profiles might encounter an Out of Memory (OOM) error on vGPU systems, which can be fixed via NIM_LOW_MEMORY_MODE=1 flag.

    • When using vGPU systems with trtllm_buildable profiles, you might still encounter a broken connection error. For example, client_loop: send disconnect: Broken pipe.

  • vLLM for A100 and H200 is not supported.

  • NIM with vLLM backend may intermittently enter a state where the API returns a “Service in unhealthy” message. This is a known issue with vLLM (vllm-project/vllm#5060). You must restart the NIM in this case.

  • You can’t deploy fp8 quantized engines on H100-NVL GPUs with deterministic generation mode on. For more information, refer to Deterministic Generation Mode in NVIDIA NIM for LLMs.

  • The default for guided decoding changed from outlines to xgrammar. For more information, refer to Structured Generation with NVIDIA NIM for LLMs.

  • The fast_outlines guided decoding backend is deprecated. For more information, refer to Custom Guided Decoding Backends with NVIDIA NIM for LLMs.

  • INT4/INT8 quantized profiles are not supported for Blackwell GPUs.

  • When using Native TLS Stack to download the model, you should set --ulimit nofile=1048576 in the docker run command. If a Helm deployment is run behind the proxy, the limit must be increased on host nodes or a custom command must be provided. See Deploying Behind a TLS Proxy for details.

  • Air Gap Deployments of a model like Llama 3.3 Nemotron Super 49B that uses the model directory option might not work if the model directory is in the HuggingFace format. Switch to using NIM_FT_MODEL in those cases. For more information, refer to Air Gap Deployment.

  • Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Ultra-253B-v1 does not work on H100s and A100s. Use H200s and B200s to deploy successfully.

Previous Releases#

The following are links to the previous release notes.

1.10 | 1.8 | 1.7 | 1.6 | 1.5 |1.4 | 1.3 | 1.2 | 1.1 | 1.0

All Current Known Issues#

The following are the current (unfixed) known issues from all previous versions:

  • All models return a 500 when setting logprobs=2, echo=true, and stream=false; they should return a 200.

  • Deploying with KServe can require changing permissions for the cache directory. See the Serving models from local assets section for details.

  • Empty metrics values on multi-GPU TensorRT-LLM model. Metrics items gpu_cache_usage_perc, num_request_max, num_requests_running, num_requests_waiting, and prompt_tokens_total won’t be reported for multi-GPU TensorRT-LLM model, because TensorRT-LLM currently doesn’t expose iteration statistics in orchestrator mode.

  • Filenames should not contain spaces if a custom fine-tuned model directory is provided.

  • Function calling and structured generation is not supported for pipeline parallelism greater than 1.

  • GET v1/metrics API is missing from the docs page (http://HOST-IP:8000/docs, where HOST-IP is the IP address of your host).

  • Logarithmic Probabilities (logprobs) support with echo:

    • TRTLLM engine needs to be built explicitly with --gather_generation_logits

    • Enabling this may impact model throughput and inter-token latency.

    • NIM_MODEL_NAME must be set to the generated model repository.

  • logit_bias is not available for any model using the TRT-LLM backend.

  • logprobs=2 is only supported for TRT-LLM (optimized) configurations for Reward models; this option is supported for the vLLM (non-optimized) configurations for all models.

  • Empty metrics values on multi-GPU TensorRT-LLM model. Metrics items gpu_cache_usage_perc, num_request_max, num_requests_running, num_requests_waiting, and prompt_tokens_total won’t be reported for multi-GPU TensorRT-LLM model, because TensorRT-LLM currently doesn’t expose iteration statistics in orchestrator mode.

All Current Known Issues for Specific Models#

The following are the current (unfixed) known issues from all previous versions, that are specific to a model:

Tip

For related information, see Troubleshoot NVIDIA NIM for LLMs.

  • Code Llama

    • FP8 profiles are not released due to accuracy degradations.

    • LoRA is not supported.

  • Deepseek

    • The min_p sampling parameter is not compatible with Deepseek and will be set to 0.0

    • The following are not supported for DeepSeek models:

      • LoRA

      • Guided Decoding

      • FT (fine-tuning)

    • DeepSeek models require setting --trust-remote-code. This is handled automatically in DeepSeek NIMs.

    • Only profiles matching the following hardware topologies are supported for the DeepSeek R1 model:

      • 2 nodes of 8xH100

      • 1 node of 8xH200

    • DeepSeek-R1 profiles disable DP attention by default to avoid crashes at higher concurrency. To turn on DP attention you can set NIM_ENABLE_DP_ATTENTION.

  • DeepSeek Coder V2 Lite Instruct does not support kv_cache_reuse for vLLM.

  • DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B

    • This model does not include pre-built engines for TP8, A10G, and H100.

    • To deploy, set -e NIM_MAX_MODEL_LEN = 131072

  • DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B

    • BF16 profiles require at least 64GB GPU memory to launch. For example, vllm-bf16-tp1-pp1 profile does not launch successfully on a single L20 or other supported GPUs with GPU memory less than 80GB.

    • Structured generation has unexpected behavior due to CoT output. Despite this, guided_json parameter exhibits normal functionality when used with a JSON schema prompt.

    • When running vLLM engine with GPU that has smaller memory, may run into ValueError of model max sequence length larger than maximum KV cache storage. Set NIM_MAX_MODEL_LEN = 32768 or less when using vLLM profile.

    • Using a trtllm_buildable profile with a fine-tuned model can crash on H100.

    • Recommend at least 80GB of CPU memory.

  • DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B

    • When running vLLM engine with GPU memory less than 48GB, may run into ValueError of model max sequence length larger than maximum KV cache storage. Set NIM_MAX_MODEL_LEN = 32768 to enable vLLM profile.

  • DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B

    • When running vLLM engine with A10G, may run into ValueError of model max sequence length larger than maximum KV cache storage. Set NIM_MAX_MODEL_LEN = 32768 to enable vLLM profile.

    • kv_cache_reuse is not supported.

    • suffix parameter is not supported in API call.

  • Gemma 2 9B

    • LoRA not supported

  • Gemma 2 2B

    • Does not support the System role in a chat or completions API call.

  • Kanana 1.5 8B Instruct 2505

    • Setting NIM_TOKENIZER_MODE=slow is not supported.

    • The server returns a 500 status code (or a 200 status code and a BadRequest error) when logprobs is set to 0 in the request.

  • Llama 3.3 Nemotron Super 49B V1

    • If you set NIM_MANIFEST_ALLOW_UNSAFE to 1, deployment fails.

    • Throughput and latency degradation observed for BF16 profiles in the 5–10% range compared to previous NIM releases and slight degradation compared to OS vLLM specifically for ISL/OSL=5k/500 at concurrencies > 100. You should set NIM_DISABLE_CUDA_GRAPH=1 when running BF16 profiles.

    • Caching engines built for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) models don’t work.

    • The model might occasionally bypass its typical thinking patterns for certain queries, especially in multi-turn conversations (for example, <think> \n\n </think>).

    • Listing the profiles for this model when the local cache is enabled can result in log warnings, which do not impact NIM functionality.

    • Logs for this model can contain spurious warnings. You can safely ignore them.

    • Avoid using the logit_bias parameter with this model because the results are unpredictable.

    • If you send more than 15 concurrent requests with detailed thinking on, the container may crash.

  • Llama 3.3 70B Instruct

    • At least 400GB of CPU memory is required.

    • Concurrent requests are blocked when running NIM with the -e NIM_MAX_MODEL_LENGTH option and a large max_tokens value in the request.

    • Accuracy was noted to be lower than the expected range with profiles vllm-bf16-tp4-pp1-lora and vllm-bf16-tp8-pp1.

    • The suffix parameter isn’t supported in API calls.

    • Insufficient memory for KV cache and LoRA cache might result in Out of Memory (OOM) errors. Make sure the hardware is appropriately sized based on the memory requirements for the workload. Long context and LoRA workloads should use larger TP configurations.

    • gather_context_logits is not enabled by default. If you require logits output, specify it in your TRT-LLM configuration when using the trtllm_buildable feature by setting the environment variable NIM_ENABLE_PROMPT_LOGPROBS.

    • Performance degradation observed for the following profiles: tensorrt_llm-h100-bf16-8, tensorrt_llm-h100_nvl-bf16-8, and tensorrt_llm-h100-bf16-8-latency.

  • Llama 3.2 1B Instruct

    • LoRA is not supported for vLLM and TRT-LLM buildable.

    • Accuracy degradation observed for profiles tensorrt_llm-h200-fp8-2-latency and tensorrt_llm-l40s-fp8-tp1-pp1-throughput-lora.

    • Performance degradation observed on the following profiles: tensorrt_llm-b200-fp8-2-latency, tensorrt_llm-a100-bf16-tp1-pp1-throughput-lora, tensorrt_llm-h100-fp8-tp1-pp1-throughput-lora, and on all non-LoRA vLLM profiles (vllm-a100-bf16-2, vllm-a10g-bf16-2, vllm-b200-bf16-2, vllm-h100_nvl-bf16-2, vllm-h100-bf16-2, vllm-h200-bf16-2, vllm-l40s-bf16-2, vllm-gh200_480gb-bf16-1, and vllm-rtx4090-bf16-1). Set NIM_DISABLE_CUDA_GRAPHS to check for improved performance.

    • If you provide an invalid value for chat_template in a chat API call, the server returns a 200 status code rather than a 400 status code.

  • Llama 3.2 3B Instruct

    • Parallel tool calling is not supported.

    • Performance degradation observed for profile tensorrt_llm-h100-fp8-1-throughput.

    • Currently, TRT-LLM profiles with LoRA enabled show performance degradation compared to vLLM-LoRA profiles at low concurrencies (1 and 5).

    • When making requests that consume the maximum sequence length generation (such as using ignore_eos: True), generation time might be significantly longer and can exhaust the available KV cache, causing future requests to stall. In this scenario, we recommend that you reduce concurrency.

    • gather_context_logits is not enabled by default. If you require logits output, specify it in your TRT-LLM configuration when using the trtllm_buildable feature by setting the environment variable NIM_ENABLE_PROMPT_LOGPROBS.

    • Insufficient memory for KV cache and LoRA cache might result in Out of Memory (OOM) errors. Make sure the hardware is appropriately sized based on the memory requirements for the workload. Long context and LoRA workloads should use larger TP configurations.

    • This NIM doesn’t include support for TRT-LLM buildable profiles.

    • Deploying a fine-tuned model fails for some TRT-LLM profiles when TP is greater than 1.

  • Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B V1

    • Currently, LoRA is not supported for this model.

    • Currently, tool calling is not supported.

    • Accuracy degradation observed for the following profiles: vllm-a100-bf16-1 and vllm-h200-bf16-2.

  • Llama 3.1 Swallow 8B Instruct v0.1

    • LoRA not supported

  • Llama 3.1 Typhoon 2 8B Instruct

    • Performance degradation observed on TRT-LLM profiles when ISL>OSL and concurrency is 100 or 250 for the following GPUs: H200, A100, and L40S.

    • The /v1/health and /v1/metrics API endpoints return incorrect response values and empty response schemas instead of the expected health status and metrics data.

  • Llama 3.1 405B Instruct

    • TRT-LLM BF16 TP16 buildable profile cannot be deployed on A100.

    • LoRA is not supported.

    • Throughput optimized profiles are not supported on A100 FP16 and H100 FP16.

    • vLLM profiles are not supported.

  • Llama 3.1 70B Instruct

    • Performance degradation observed for vLLM profiles on the following GPUs:

      • B200

      • H200

      • H200 NVL

      • H100

      • H100 NVL

      • A100

      • A100 40GB

      • L20

    • Performance degradation observed for TRT-LLM profiles on the following GPUs:

      • H200

      • H200 NVL

      • H100

    • Accuracy degradation observed for the following profiles:

      • H200 TRT-LLM

      • B200 FP8, TP2, LoRa

    • Concurrent requests are blocked when running NIM with the -e NIM_MAX_MODEL_LENGTH option and a large max_tokens value in the request.

    • vLLM profiles are not supported

    • Accuracy was noted to be lower than the expected range with the following profiles: vllm-l40s-bf16-8, vllm-l40s-bf16-4, vllm-h200-bf16-8, vllm-h200-bf16-2, vllm-h100-bf16-8, vllm-h100-bf16-2, vllm-h100_nvl-bf16-8, and vllm-h100_nvl-bf16-4.

    • The suffix parameter isn’t supported in API calls.

    • Insufficient memory for KV cache and LoRA cache might result in Out of Memory (OOM) errors. Verify that the hardware is appropriately sized based on the memory requirements for the workload. Long context and LoRA workloads should use larger TP configurations.

    • LoRA A10G TP8 for both vLLM and TRTLLM not supported due to insufficient memory.

    • The performance of vLLM LoRA on L40s TP88 is significantly suboptimal.

    • Deploying with KServe fails. As a workaround, try increasing the CPU memory to at least 77GB in the runtime YAML file.

    • Buildable TRT-LLM BF16 TP4 LoRA profiles on A100 and H100 can fail due to not enough host memory. You can work around this problem by setting NIM_LOW_MEMORY_MODE=1.

  • Llama 3.1 8B Base

    • vLLM profiles are not supported.

  • Llama 3.1 8B Instruct RTX

    • Create chat completion with non-existing model returns a 500 when it should return a 404.

  • Llama 3.1 8B Instruct

    • vLLM profiles are not supported.

    • LoRA is not supported on L40S with TRT-LLM.

    • H100 and L40s LoRA profiles can hang with high (>2000) ISL values.

    • For the LoRA enabled profiles, TTFT can be worse with the pre-built engines compared to the vLLM fallback while throughput is better. If TTFT is critical, please consider using the vLLM fallback.

    • For requests that consume the maximum sequence length generation (for example, requests that use ignore_eos: True), generation time can be very long and the request can consume the available KV cache causing future requests to stall. You should reduce concurrency under these conditions.

    • Performance degradation observed for BF16 profiles for ISL=5000 OSL=500 when concurrency > 100.

  • Llama 3.1 models

    • vLLM profiles fail with ValueError: Unknown RoPE scaling type extended.

  • Llama 3.1 FP8

    • requires NVIDIA driver version >= 550

  • Meta Llama 3 70B Instruct

    • LoRA isn’t supported on 8 x GPU configuration

  • Meta Llama 2 70B Chat

    • The vllm-fp16-tp2 profile has been validated and is known to work on H100 x 2 and A100 x 2 configurations. Other GPUs might encounter a “CUDA out of memory” issue.

  • Mistral NeMo Minitron 8B 8K Instruct

    • Tool calling is not supported.

    • LoRA is not supported.

    • vLLM TP4 or TP8 profiles are not available.

  • Mistral 7B Instruct V0.3

    • With optimized TRT-LLM profiles has lower performance compared to the OpenSource vLLM.

  • Mixtral 8x7B Instruct V0.1

    • Does not support function calling and structured generation on vLLM profiles. See vLLM #9433 for details.

    • LoRA is not supported with TRTLLM backend for MoE models

    • vLLM LoRA profiles return an internal server error/500. Set NIM_MAX_LORA_RANK=256 to use LoRA with vLLM.

    • vLLM profiles do not support function calling and structured generation. See vLLM #9433.

    • If you enable NIM_ENABLE_KV_CACHE_REUSE with the L40S FP8 TP4 Throughput profile, deployment fails.

  • Nemotron4 models

    • Require use of ‘slow’ tokenizers. ‘fast’ tokenizers causes accuracy degradation.

  • Phi 3 Mini 4K Instruct

    • LoRA is not supported

    • Tool calling is not supported

  • Phind Codellama 34B V2 Instruct

    • LoRA is not supported

    • Tool calling is not supported

  • Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct

  • Qwen2.5 72B Instruct

    • The alternative option to use vLLM is not supported due to poor performance. For the GPUs that have no optimized version, use the trtllm_buildable feature to build the TRT-LLM on the fly.

    • For all pre-built engines, gather_context_logits is not enabled. If users require logits output, specify it in your own TRT-LLM configuration when you use the trtllm_buildable feature

    • The tool_choice is not supported.

    • Deploying NIM with NIM_LOG_LEVEL=CRITICAL causes the start process to hang. Use WARNING, DEBUG or INFO instead.

  • Qwen2.5 7B Instruct

    • A pre-built TRT-LLM engine for L20 is available, but it is not fully optimized for different use cases.

    • LoRA is not supported.

    • The tool_choice parameter is not supported.

    • Deploying NIM with NIM_LOG_LEVEL=CRITICAL causes the start process to hang.

    • May have performance issue at a specific use case, when using vLLM backend on L20.

  • Sarvam - M

    • Tool calling is not supported.

    • The suffix parameter is not supported in API calls.

    • The stream_options parameter is not supported in API calls.

    • The logprobs parameter is not supported when stream=true in API calls.

    • This model requires at least 48GB of VRAM but cannot be launched on a single 48GB GPU such as L40S. Single-GPU deployment is only supported on GPUs with 80GB or more of VRAM (for example, A100 80GB or H100 80GB).

  • SILMA 9B Instruct v1.0

    • This model is optimized for Arabic language contexts. While the model does process input in other languages, you may experience inconsistencies or reduced accuracy in content generated for non-Arabic languages.

    • The suffix parameter isn’t supported in API calls.

  • StarCoderBase 15.5B

    • Does not support the chat endpoint.

  • StarCoder2 7B

    • Deployment fails on H100 with vLLM (TP1, PP1) at 250 concurrent requests.

    • Deployment fails for vLLM profiles when NIM_ENABLE_KV_CACHE_REUSE=1.

    • Using FP32 checkpoints for the NIM_FT_MODEL variable or local build isn’t supported.

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