Why it matters

Paged KV enables high throughput serving. Contiguous allocation wastes memory badly.

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The architecture

Block table maps logical to physical.

Fixed block size.

Enables sharing.

Paged KV cacheBlocksfixed sizeBlock tablelogical to physicalSharingprefix + copy-on-writevLLM (Kwon et al. 2023) introduced PagedAttention; 2-4x throughput gain vs contiguous
Paged KV cache.
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How it works end to end

vLLM PagedAttention.

Block table indirection.

Prefix sharing across requests.