v0.2.0-rc.1

Pre-release documenting the first real-hardware bring-up of the Ascend 910B backend. vLLM-Ascend
now serves on a physical 910B, the operator's rendered manifests are confirmed correct for the 910
family, and the gateway data-plane is verified against the live NPU. The remaining gap — the operator
scheduling a backend pod onto an NPU via the device plugin (full integrated scale-to-zero e2e) — needs
a schedulable NPU node and stays open. Ascend support is therefore experimental / technical preview,
not yet "supported." Still v1alpha1 and not production-ready.

Added

• Ascend 910B validation report + bring-up runbook (docs/ascend-910b-validation.md)
  capturing the verified environment (910B2C 64 GB, CANN 9.0.0 / driver 26.0.rc1), the smoke test,
  the operator render dry-run, and the gateway data-plane results.

Changed

• Ascend runtime image pinned to quay.io/ascend/vllm-ascend:v0.21.0rc1 (was v0.18.0) — the
  base Atlas-A2/910B tag, matching the vllm_ascend 0.21.0rc1 stack verified on real hardware.
• Ascend status updated from "scaffolded, not run on hardware" to experimental / technical
  preview across README, ROADMAP, and the adapter docs, reflecting what is now verified on a real
  910B (vLLM-Ascend serves; manifests render correctly; gateway data-plane works) versus what is not
  (device-plugin scheduling + full integrated e2e).

Verified (Ascend 910B, real hardware)

• vLLM-Ascend serves on the NPU — Qwen2.5 loaded onto a 910B2C and answered via the OpenAI API
  (CANN 9.0.0 / driver 26.0.rc1, vllm-ascend 0.21.0rc1).
• Operator renders a correct 910B backend (kind dry-run) — huawei.com/Ascend910 request, CANN
  driver host-mounts, ModelScope cache wiring, load-gated probes; vendor selector resolves to vllm-ascend.
• Gateway data-plane on real NPU — /healthz, /hearth/queue (incl. demand-linger), /metrics,
  OpenAI passthrough (streaming + non-streaming), and cold-start SSE keepalive → activation timeout → 503.

Not yet verified

• Operator → Ascend device plugin → backend pod scheduled and serving on the NPU, and the full
  integrated 0→1→N→0 loop on a real NPU node (the v1 "supported" milestone).

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🙏 Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release — the merged PRs and first-time
contributors are credited under What's Changed and New Contributors below.

What's Changed

🔧 Other Changes

• docs(crd): flag unimplemented fields by @ded-furby in #40

New Contributors

• @ded-furby made their first contribution in #40

Full Changelog: v0.1.0...v0.2.0-rc.1