vllm-omni/docs/design/omni_edge_e2e_roadmap.md

Local PC/mobile end-to-end support and profiling roadmap

This plan covers the 60 named device/model pairings. Each pairing must finish with either a qualified local pipeline or a documented feasibility/implementation blocker. It does not promise that every model fits every device. The current profiling review records measured execution separately from release qualification.

The 2026-09-23 recovery run adds a functional CPU TTS stream with playback underruns, a scoped RTX Qwen3.8 text/image pass, verified MiniCPM-o and InternVLA weights, a MiniCPM-o three-stage text-to-speech functional pass after correcting request embeddings, and an InternVLA real-weight synthetic action forward. Model-quality and device gates remain open; the 2026-09-22 audit remains the historical baseline.

The WSL CPU expansion adds constrained three-stage MiniCPM-o text-to-speech requests and a CPU-only InternVLA synthetic policy forward. A subsequent 20-request serial MiniCPM-o profile measured p50 21.86 s/p95 22.97 s request wall time after one warmup, with swap use under the 30.91 GiB WSL limit. It does not qualify speech quality, concurrency, streaming, loading peak or sustained behavior. A separate native Windows RTX 5090 Laptop MiniCPM-o three-stage text-to-speech request passed with explicit 900/600 s startup limits after the default 300 s overall timeout had expired. A later native Windows 20-request serial run measured p50 18.38 s and p95 18.73 s, but sampled host available RAM fell to 0.78 GB and pagefile use reached 11.17 GB. Native Windows InternVLA direct-policy runs separately passed on CPU and RTX 5090 Laptop with synthetic inputs; AMD and mobile cells do not inherit these passes.

The WSL RTX MiniCPM-o image-to-text+speech path now passes for one 448×448 synthetic red-square image under an explicit 0.61 thinker GPU budget. The previous 0.58 budget failed the 2,048-token KV admission gate; the successful run still force-killed stage 0 during shutdown and reported a shared-memory cleanup warning. A separate 2 s, 440 Hz synthetic tone now traverses audio input to text+speech and yielded a plausible whistling description, also with a shared-memory cleanup warning. Native Windows RTX also completed these two separate synthetic image and tone inputs through all three stages, returning the same respective text and thinker token IDs as WSL with nonzero WAVs. Broader image/audio quality, video, repeated multimodal latency and clean lifecycle remain open.

WSL CPU MiniCPM-o now also completes one synthetic red-square image and one 440 Hz tone through thinker, talker and vocoder under separate one-item plans. Both return plausible text and nonzero WAVs, but CPU wording/token IDs differ from GPU, swap is heavily used, and stage 0 requires forced shutdown with shared-memory cleanup warnings. These single requests do not inherit the 20-request text latency profile or establish real image/audio quality.

Native Windows HX370 CPU now also completes two Qwen3-TTS CustomVoice text-to-WAV requests through Qwen's standalone PyTorch wrapper using the pinned 0.6B checkpoint. A separate 1-warmup/20-measured serial profile of one short prompt took p50/p95 13.94/14.68 s to generate 4.56 s of audio. Whisper tiny.en ASR gave word error rates 0.20 and 0.00 for the two WAVs, an intelligibility proxy rather than a quality pass. The raw record documents the isolated Transformers 4.57.3 dependency and short process-memory trace. The subsequent Omni CPU whole-session stage matched both standalone PCM hashes exactly, returned a public AsyncOmni audio event, and completed one warmup plus 20 serial measured requests at p50/p95 15.32/15.60 s for 4.56 s of audio. It reserves 10 GiB host RAM, rejects an insufficient 4 GiB demand before worker launch, and drains an in-flight cancellation without stale output or remaining reservation. This closes the scoped CPU stage-binding task. Playable streaming, post-cancel restart, loading-peak admission, broad speech quality and sustained power/thermal tests remain M2 work.

A separate native Windows CPU+Radeon 890M Qwen3-TTS route now completes two named text-to-WAV requests in standalone CrispASR using a Q8_0 talker, F16 codec, Vulkan talker/codec and CPU FP32 code predictor. Whisper tiny.en returned both reference sentences exactly; one warmup and 20 serial resident-server requests measured p50/p95 3.310/3.345 s for 2.56 s of audio. The placement and failed-route record shows that default Vulkan silently becomes CPU for this backend, all-Vulkan generation ran away, and DirectML did not pass quality. The explicit hybrid route remains outside Omni and slower than real time. Its CPU+iGPU evidence does not advance the NPU joint-execution row or mobile M2 gate.

Architecture and prerequisites

Keep Omni's PipelineConfig, StageRuntime, StageClient, orchestration and admission as the control plane. Keep vLLM's model execution, caches and internal batching. Other runtimes implement stage backends. Model adapters own preprocessing, sampling, modality alignment, state semantics and output interpretation.

The portable boundary is request/events, tensor or buffer contracts, opaque state handles, device capabilities, artifact manifests and execution plans. Persistent weights, KV/ring/recurrent state and workspaces stay with the backend. Prefer one backend per autoregressive session; split coarse stages only after measuring a complete-chain benefit.

Android may use a small native controller derived from Omni's stage, session and streaming semantics, constrained by the same contract tests. A full Python/vLLM service port is not a prerequisite. AI Hub remains a validation facility rather than a deployment dependency.

Before advancing individual cells:

1. Pin installed runtime builds and checkpoint revisions. Repair the CPU vLLM/Omni mismatch and native Windows CPU attention-operator gap independently.
2. The complete MiniCPM-o 4.5 and InternVLA-A1 source checkpoints are now SHA-256 verified. Record export, quantization, calibration, compiler, shape buckets, state layout and quality evidence before target-specific claims.
3. Integrate native and external stages into the shared admission ledger. CPU/iGPU/NPU share physical RAM; Windows availability and WSL quota are separate constraints on that RAM. Budget loading peaks, weights, state, activations, workspace, transfers and safety margin. Discrete VRAM is separate.
4. Require bounded queues, consumer acknowledgement, cancellation propagation, sequence/epoch fencing, state retirement and actual placement reporting. No silent precision/model/context changes or CPU fallback labelled as NPU.
5. Record exact SKU/RAM, OS, drivers, installed packages, power state and device access. A local mobile application needs full on-device execution access; AI Hub component jobs alone do not establish that access or an E2E pipeline.

Implementation ownership follows the existing source boundaries: portable contracts, host routes and process lifetime, StageClient and backend adapters, StageRuntime, and the resource ledger. The current GraphStageClient represents one bounded, non-preemptible graph call. Persistent mobile sessions require an explicitly negotiated backend capability and lifecycle implementation; a state-handle type alone is insufficient.

Work packages and completion gates

Order	Work package	Implementation	Gate before wider rollout
Foundation	Runtime, contracts and accounting	Close the prerequisites above; reuse the existing qualification runners	Reproducible launch or explicit pre-load refusal, correct state ownership and placement, auditable memory budget
M1	S25 Spark	Device-local Omni-compatible controller; embedding, prefill, continuous decode, ring/full KV, head and sampler; resident state	Reference checks, at least 128 output tokens, 512-window/1024-bucket transitions, cancellation, resident memory and sustained profile
M2	Qwen3-TTS	Resolve desktop playback and shutdown findings and CPU compatibility; then mobile talker/predictor plus GPU vocoder	Complete PCM and tail, history/chunk correctness, interruption/recovery, quality checks, no post-startup underruns and RTF below 1 in the declared workload
M3	AMD stages	Connect compatible real encoders or other useful coarse stages through current Omni workers; start from the existing 890M vision evidence	Actual node/device placement, numerical and task quality, complete downstream output, shared-memory and handoff costs; reject unhelpful splits
M4a	MiniCPM-o 4.5	Three-stage desktop text+WAV produced coherent text and nonzero WAV on RTX 5090 Laptop under WSL and native Windows, and WSL CPU, using separate constrained plans. One synthetic red-square image and one synthetic tone each passed through the three-stage WSL RTX, native Windows RTX and WSL CPU paths to text and nonzero WAV. RTX text/token IDs matched across OS environments; CPU wording/token IDs differed while remaining plausible. The WSL RTX image plan needed a thinker GPU budget increase from 0.58 to 0.61 for KV admission. WSL multimodal shutdown cleanup remains open, including forced stage-0 termination on CPU. The CPU plan needed vLLM 0.28/0.29 processor compatibility and used swap; 20 serial text CPU requests measured p50 21.86 s/p95 22.97 s. Native Windows needed longer startup limits; 20 serial text requests measured p50 18.38 s/p95 18.73 s with host RAM/pagefile pressure. Add video encoder and persistent-state reference before mobile artifacts	Speech intelligibility/alignment, loading-peak admission, concurrency, broad image/audio-understanding suites, video, shutdown lifecycle, then combined streaming and interruption
M4b	InternVLA-A1	Real weights, observation preprocessing, shared prefix state, iterative action head and versioned action metadata; strict-load synthetic policy forwards now pass on WSL and native Windows, each on CPU and RTX 5090 Laptop	Reference action agreement on real observations, units/order/timestamps, observation age, stale-input handling and application-specific deadline reporting
Independent	Qwen3.8-27B	Public Omni pipeline binding; text, then image/video and longer contexts; same-model CPU/iGPU artifact and explicit offload evaluation	Modality-specific quality, actual loading/runtime memory and measured performance; each precision/context receives its own qualification

The initial M0 desktop text acceptance remains scoped to its tested checkpoint, precision and workload. New concurrency, state-boundary or quality evidence is required before broadening that acceptance. Current batch-dependent greedy outputs need reference analysis; timing alone cannot identify their cause.

The 2026-09-23 Spark GGUF Omni follow-up adds a separate native Windows CPU/Radeon 890M whole-session option. Its pinned 1.7B Q4_K_M artifact passed two named complete text requests and 20 serial inventory requests per device through StageRuntime/StagePool; public AsyncOmni short requests passed on both devices. It verifies CPU or Vulkan1 placement, explicit 4 GiB host reservation, terminal event/acknowledgement and cancellation drain. This does not change the vLLM M0 acceptance or establish M1 mobile generation. Its next gates are incremental output, post-cancel restart, broader token/quality parity, loading/device-memory peaks, concurrency and sustained power/thermal behavior.

The Qwen3-TTS Omni hybrid follow-up adds one complete-request stage for the native Windows HX370 CPU+Radeon 890M route. A pinned Q8_0 talker and F16 codec produced two named PCM outputs exactly matching the prior standalone backend; one warmup plus 20 serial requests measured 3.298/3.336 s p50/p95 for 2.56 s of audio. Public AsyncOmni audio, cancellation drain and explicit 8 GiB host admission passed. This is progress toward M2 integration, not M2 acceptance: RTF remains above 1, and playable chunk streaming, post-cancel restart, loading/iGPU peaks, broader voice quality and 30-minute thermal behavior remain open. No NPU participated.

VLA qualification here ends at action data. Physical robot control, collision avoidance and actuator safety belong to the external controller.

Hardware routes

Every row below covers all five model families through the work packages above. Specific artifact/backend feasibility is a gate, not assumed from the route.

Execution configuration	Route to qualify	Main additional gate
CPU only, WSL	Compatible vLLM CPU; a model-specific external CPU backend where required	ISA, complete model operations, artifact format and total RAM
CPU only, native Windows	Native CPU worker implementing the same contracts	Executable attention/state operations and matching model adapter; CUDA success does not cover this row
CPU + NVIDIA, WSL	Complete-model reference using vLLM/Omni CUDA	Full modalities and quality, stable power conditions, loading and sustained memory
CPU + NVIDIA, native Windows	Native installation of the same declared pipeline	IPC/process lifetime, filesystem/startup scope, streaming and shutdown validated separately
CPU + Radeon 890M	Compatible whole-model backend or CPU model plus coarse iGPU stages	Full downstream model result and transfers, not only an encoder result
CPU + AMD NPU	CPU model plus compiled NPU stages	Accepted artifact, actual NPU placement, quality and net E2E contribution
CPU+iGPU+NPU, with/without NVIDIA	Select stage placements after establishing individual routes	Co-resident memory/power; identical-workload single-backend versus split-serial versus split-overlapped comparison
Snapdragon X Elite PC	Windows ARM controller and target-specific CPU/GPU/QNN stages	Full application access, Windows ARM artifacts and RAM; Android binaries are not interchangeable
Galaxy S25	Spark first, TTS second; memory-qualified MiniCPM-o/VLA afterward	Complete device-local state/streaming loop and sustained measurements
Galaxy S24	Rebuild and revalidate the selected mobile pipeline	Independent SoC/runtime/quality qualification; S25 results do not transfer
SA8775P ADP	Target-local controller and compatible compiled stages	Complete application access, parity, memory and sustained co-residency
RB3 Gen 2 / QCS6490	Supported integer NPU artifacts or an explicitly chosen CPU/GPU route	Resolve rejected artifact constraints, then full-model quality and performance

Expand the joint-execution row into separate deployments with and without NVIDIA when implementing it. Likewise, checkpoint size, precision, RAM SKU and OS variants require separate execution plans and results beneath each overview cell; a pass for one variant does not qualify the entire model or device family.

For Qwen27, nominal four-bit language weights alone are about 12.6 GiB; the actual artifact, remaining weights, state, workspace and OS require more. Gate small-memory targets before export/integration investment. Record an artifact-specific capacity rejection rather than substituting a smaller model. Treat unenumerated mobile/embedded SKUs as new qualification rows.

Profiling protocol for every executable cell

Use the profiling harness and keep raw samples, outputs, configuration, logs and traces. Record the actual installed runtime as well as the source revision. Run competing workloads serially on the same physical machine.

Dimension	Required measurements
Startup	Compilation, process/import/preparation, constructor/load, first output and warm restart separately; explicit cache conditions
Workload	Short/medium/long inputs, concurrency 1 then 2/4 where admitted, at least 20 measured requests per group; separate warmup and state-boundary cases
Text	TTFT, delivery/token intervals, decode rate, complete request time; effective prefill separated from isolated device compute
Speech	First playable PCM, RTF, chunk arrival gaps, playback deficit count/duration, tail/flush and interruption latency
Multimodal/VLA	Preprocessing, encoders, downstream completion, modality alignment, observation-to-action age and deadline misses
Memory	Loading/runtime peaks, state growth with context/concurrency, workspace and transfers; physical RAM, WSL quota and VRAM kept distinct
Placement	Actual executed devices and fallback; copies, conversions, synchronization, stage queues and handoff time
Sustained behavior	At least 30 minutes; power mode, clocks, temperature, memory and latency trends; energy only within available sensor scope
Reliability	Slow consumers, cancellation, repeated sessions, memory admission and owned-worker failure; no stale/duplicate output and verified retirement
Instrumentation	Separate matched before/traced/after diagnostics; profiler RPC/export costs; retain uninstrumented timing baseline

Report p50/p95 with sample counts and measurement boundaries. Preserve failures and retries. Component sums are not E2E measurements, and whole-GPU power is not CPU/NPU or whole-device energy. Low-clock/power-limited measurements remain valid for those observed conditions; they do not establish optimized performance.

For heterogeneous candidates, hold inputs, artifact quality, context, concurrency and power conditions fixed. Keep a split only if the full chain improves latency, capacity or energy after transfers, synchronization, initialization and contention.

Per-cell completion and repair record

Progress each cell through artifact readiness, correctness, complete local execution, profiling and qualification. Functional and performance qualification are separate fields. A final record contains:

• Exact device/OS and artifact/backend identities; declared modalities and limits.
• Reproducible command and explicit execution plan, including actual placement.
• Quality, state/streaming and memory-admission outcomes with raw evidence.
• Performance distributions, sustained behavior and sensor limitations.
• On failure: failing layer, configuration, observed reason, evidence and the smallest next repair/experiment. Distinguish missing prerequisites from an attempted run that failed, a rejected artifact and an unqualified result.

Text latency and VLA deadlines require workload-specific product targets. Do not invent universal thresholds. A completed timing protocol alone is not a release pass. The current 60-cell matrix and its profiling follow-up are the starting backlog; subsequent repairs should replace only the affected cells after repeating their complete gates.