[Installation]: Documented v0.18.0 cu128 release wheel URL returns 404

[ouyangziheng]

Your current environment

I followed the official v0.18.0 GPU installation docs for pre-built wheels.

The docs say that vLLM provides binaries compiled with CUDA 12.8 / 12.9 / 13.0, and give the following URL pattern for release wheels:

vllm-${VLLM_VERSION}+cu${CUDA_VERSION}-cp38-abi3-manylinux_2_35_${CPU_ARCH}.whl

For v0.18.0 on x86_64 with CUDA 12.8, this resolves to:

https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/releases/download/v0.18.0/vllm-0.18.0+cu128-cp38-abi3-manylinux_2_35_x86_64.whl

However, this URL returns HTTP 404.

Command used

uv pip install \
  "https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/releases/download/v${VLLM_VERSION}/vllm-${VLLM_VERSION}+cu128-cp38-abi3-manylinux_2_35_${CPU_ARCH}.whl" \
  --extra-index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu128

<img width="1367" height="212" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/f3520447-bcc0-4ea6-a8fa-2f18aac84552" />

### How you are installing vllm

uv pip install \
>   "https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/releases/download/v${VLLM_VERSION}/vllm-${VLLM_VERSION}+cu128-cp38-abi3-manylinux_2_35_${CPU_ARCH}.whl" \
>   --extra-index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu128

### Before submitting a new issue...

- [x] Make sure you already searched for relevant issues, and asked the chatbot living at the bottom right corner of the [documentation page](https://docs.vllm.ai/en/latest/), which can answer lots of frequently asked questions.

[ggregoire]

The last release has assets only for cuda 13.0: https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/releases/tag/v0.18.0 (same for 0.17)

I'm on cuda 12.8 too so I've been looking at various quick and easy solutions (pypi, docker, etc…) but they all have been compiled with cuda 13.0, so it always ends with the error CUDA error: the provided PTX was compiled with an unsupported toolchain at runtime. And cuda-compat doesn't work with RTX GPUs.

I think the only solution left is to build from source or upgrade to cuda 13.0. So far I didn't succeed to build from source, I get another error at runtime (I might create a new issue, I have found nothing about this error). Also it takes 2 hours to compile on a decent machine so it's not ideal to debug.

Edit: I finally succeeded to build it with the following Dockerfile:

FROM nvidia/cuda:12.8.1-cudnn-devel-ubuntu22.04

RUN apt -y update && apt -y install \
    libnvidia-compute-570=570.124.06-0ubuntu1 \
    libnvidia-decode-570=570.124.06-0ubuntu1 \
    libnvidia-encode-570=570.124.06-0ubuntu1 \
    python3 \
    python3-pip \
    python3-dev \
    git

# Fix build time error: "error: externally-managed-environment"
RUN python3 -m pip config set global.break-system-packages true

RUN pip install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu128

ENV TORCH_CUDA_ARCH_LIST="12.0" \
    MAX_JOBS=8 \
    NVCC_THREADS=2

RUN git clone --depth 1 --branch v0.18.0 https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm.git \
    && cd vllm \
    && python3 use_existing_torch.py \
    && pip install -r requirements/build.txt \
    && pip install -e . --no-build-isolation

WORKDIR /app

# add instructions related to your app…

I think the previous error I had was due to using the base image pytorch/pytorch:2.10.0-cuda12.8-cudnn9-devel. The only change I made to make it work was to replace the image with nvidia/cuda:12.8.1-cudnn-devel-ubuntu22.04 and install pytorch from pypi.

I also had to start VLLM with enforce_eager=True, gpu_memory_utilization=0.8 and max_num_seqs=1 to fix another bunch of issues. Now it works with Qwen3.5 (thinking mode disabled).

[yiakwy-xpu-ml-framework-team]

I can confirm that you can use vllm v0.18 with CUDA 12.8. (pytorch 2.10.0/2.8.0)

[undefine-man]

@ggregoire Did you find any solution to run vllm with cuda 12.8 ?

[undefine-man]

@yiakwy-xpu-ml-framework-team How to make it ?

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