mlxcel

High-performance LLM/VLM inference runtime and server for Apple Silicon. The CLI and server are implemented in Rust and execute models through native MLX C++ bindings. Linux/CUDA builds are supported as a secondary target.

New in v0.3.0

• Nine new model families. BitNet b1.58 (1.58-bit ternary), IBM Granite dense and GraniteMoeHybrid, LFM2 / LFM2-MoE, Falcon-H1, PLaMo 2, Apertus, ByteDance Seed-OSS, and dots.llm1 MoE, on top of the existing Llama, Qwen, Gemma, and DeepSeek coverage.
• Faster MoE decode, on by default. The fused decode-MoE Metal kernel beats the previous gather path on single-token decode (about 13% on gemma4) and is now enabled by default. Set MLXCEL_FUSED_MOE=0 to disable.
• Loads newer mixed-precision checkpoints. mlxcel now reads per-layer mixed bit widths and bf16 quantization scales, so recent mlx-community exports (for example 8-bit embeddings under a 4-bit default) load correctly. A bf16-scale decode regression on M1 Ultra is also fixed.
• Linux CUDA release builds. Prebuilt x86_64 and aarch64 CUDA artifacts ship with bundled CCCL headers and reuse JIT-compiled kernels across runs through a persistent PTX cache.

See the changelog for the full list.

Overview

mlxcel provides a Rust command-line runtime and an OpenAI-compatible model server for MLX-format checkpoints. Loading, scheduling, and inference stay in one native process while model execution goes through MLX C++ bindings. It runs a broad range of text and vision-language model families directly from mlx-community checkpoints, with no conversion step.

The project started as work on structural model fine-tuning and has grown into a general-purpose serving runtime for local and small-cluster inference.

Why mlxcel

• Smaller runtime surface. Model loading, scheduling, and inference stay in a single native server process. Deployments do not need to provision a Python environment, keep package versions in sync, or route requests through an interpreter layer.
• Simple deployment artifact. mlxcel and mlxcel-server build as native executables, which makes packaging, service supervision, and upgrades straightforward. Platform runtime libraries are still required: for example macOS frameworks on Apple Silicon, and CUDA/OpenBLAS/LAPACK components for Linux builds.
• llama-server-style operation. mlxcel-server accepts many llama-server-compatible flags and LLAMA_ARG_* environment variables, which makes migration from llama.cpp-based scripts simpler. Treat this as compatibility-oriented, not a guarantee that every llama.cpp option has identical behavior.
• OpenAI-compatible HTTP API subset. The server supports SSE streaming and the /v1/chat/completions, /v1/completions, and /v1/responses endpoints.
• Serving features for real deployments. Continuous batching, prompt-prefix caching, automatic prefix caching, speculative decoding, and KV-cache compression are available for supported model/runtime combinations.
• Differentiated runtime controls. Default builds expose first-class YAML load-time model surgery through --surgery / MLXCEL_SURGERY, with operations such as scale, add, prune, replace, and interpolate for reproducible weight-space changes without retraining or writing converted checkpoints.
• Multi-device and distributed modes. Tensor parallelism and pipeline parallelism are implemented for selected model families, including zero-config pipeline startup with static or mDNS-based discovery.
• Broad model-family coverage. The runtime includes loaders for Llama, Qwen, Gemma, Phi, Mistral/Mixtral, DeepSeek, Cohere, InternLM, GLM, ExaOne, OLMo, ERNIE, Hunyuan, Mamba/RWKV/Jamba, Nemotron, MiniMax, Step, Kimi, and multiple VLM families. See Supported models for the maintained list.

Quick start

Install with Homebrew (macOS/Linux)

The Homebrew formula installs both mlxcel and mlxcel-server:

brew tap lablup/tap
brew install mlxcel

Run a model

The quickest path is mlxcel run: it resolves the model argument, auto-downloads on first use, reuses it afterward, and runs from any directory.

# Interactive chat REPL.
mlxcel run mlx-community/Qwen3.5-0.8B-4bit

# Bare name resolves to mlx-community/<name>.
mlxcel run Qwen3.5-0.8B-4bit

# One-shot generation with -p, then exit.
mlxcel run Qwen3.5-0.8B-4bit -p "Hello, world!" -n 100

# No model argument falls back to the default
# mlx-community/gemma-4-e2b-it-4bit.
mlxcel run

generate, serve, and inspect take the same model argument via -m, a HuggingFace owner/name repo-id (auto-downloaded into the store and reused after), a bare name (resolved as mlx-community/<name>), or an existing local path. mlxcel run is a thin wrapper over mlxcel generate and shares its sampling and generation flags.

# One-off generation.
mlxcel generate -m Qwen3.5-0.8B-4bit -p "Hello, world!" -n 100

# OpenAI-compatible server (mlxcel serve is the subcommand equivalent).
mlxcel-server -m Qwen3.5-0.8B-4bit --port 8080

# Restrict browser CORS to specific origins (default reflects any origin).
mlxcel-server -m Qwen3.5-0.8B-4bit --port 8080 --allowed-origins https://app.example.com,https://admin.example.com

# Read-only memory budget: weights + KV cache vs. available unified memory.
mlxcel inspect -m Qwen3.5-0.8B-4bit --max-tokens 32768

# Preflight that aborts if the model + 32K KV cache will not fit
# (--force, alias --no-memory-check, overrides the abort).
mlxcel generate -m Qwen3.5-0.8B-4bit -p "Hello, world!" -n 32768 --estimate-memory

Downloaded models land in a location-independent global store at ${MLXCEL_CACHE_DIR:-$HOME/.cache/mlxcel}/models/<owner>/<name>, shared across every working directory. To relocate the store, write a snapshot to an exact path, change the default org, or tune the memory preflight, see Environment variables, MLXCEL_MODELS_DIR / --models-dir, --local-dir, MLXCEL_DEFAULT_ORG, and MLXCEL_MEMORY_LIMIT / MLXCEL_HEADROOM_FACTOR.

If you build from source instead, use ./target/release/mlxcel and ./target/release/mlxcel-server in place of the installed commands above.

Manage downloaded models

List and prune the global store from any directory:

# List downloaded models with name, size, and last-modified time.
mlxcel list

# Machine-readable output (stable JSON array: repo_id, size_bytes, path, modified).
mlxcel list --json

# Repo-ids only, pipe-friendly for scripting (e.g. xargs mlxcel rm).
mlxcel list -q

# Restore the absolute path column.
mlxcel list -v

# Remove a model from the global store (prompts for confirmation).
mlxcel rm mlx-community/Qwen3.5-0.8B-4bit

# Remove without the prompt (for scripts / non-interactive shells).
mlxcel rm mlx-community/Qwen3.5-0.8B-4bit --yes

mlxcel arch prints the supported model-architecture catalog instead. mlxcel rm <repo-id> deletes only inside the mlxcel store and honors the same --models-dir override; a model that exists solely in the read-only HuggingFace cache (HF_HUB_CACHE / HF_HOME) is reported but never deleted.

Build from source on Apple Silicon

Prerequisites:

• Rust toolchain
• Xcode Command Line Tools
• CMake-compatible build environment
• Apple Metal toolchain component

xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain   # one-time, if not already installed
git clone https://github.com/lablup/mlxcel.git
cd mlxcel
cargo build --release --features metal,accelerate

Linux/CUDA builds use the cuda feature and require the CUDA toolkit plus the system libraries used by MLX. See Installation for the detailed prerequisite matrix.

Performance

mlxcel targets near-mlx-lm / mlx-vlm decode throughput for MLX-format checkpoints while keeping a native Rust runtime. In the M5 Max 128GB benchmark campaign, the headline result has two parts: faster short-prompt text prefill and near-reference decode throughput.

Prefill: prompt ingestion before the first generated token

Short-prompt text prefill is the standout result. mlxcel measured 2.78x the mlx-lm median on M5 Max across 67 comparable text pairs, and 1.79x on M1 Ultra across 74 comparable text pairs. VLM prefill is listed separately because image preprocessing, vision encoder, and projector work can be included in the prefill path.

Mode	Baseline	M5 Max pairs	M5 Max median vs baseline	M1 Ultra pairs	M1 Ultra median vs baseline
Text	mlx-lm	67	2.78x	74	1.79x
VLM	mlx-vlm	25	1.01x	20	1.05x

Decode: steady-state token generation

Decode stays close to the Python MLX references on the same host. For M5 Max, text decode averaged 99% of mlx-lm with a 100% median, while VLM decode averaged 98% of mlx-vlm with a 98% median.

Mode	Baseline	Comparable pairs	Average vs baseline	Median vs baseline	>=90% parity	>= baseline	Range
Text	mlx-lm	67	99%	100%	62 / 67 (93%)	31 / 67 (46%)	45%-129%
VLM	mlx-vlm	24	98%	98%	18 / 24 (75%)	10 / 24 (42%)	59%-121%

Representative decode throughput is shown below in tokens per second. The mlxcel columns are the 2026-06-15 sweep on each host (v0.3.0, including the fix to a quantized-decode regression on bf16-scale checkpoints that mostly affected M1 Ultra). The M5 Max mlx-lm / mlx-vlm reference columns are retained from the earlier same-host campaign, so each ratio is mlxcel (2026-06-15) over that retained reference; a fresh same-host mlx-lm / mlx-vlm run validated that the reference is stable. M1 Ultra values are mlxcel-only capacity references. Absolute results depend on model family, quantization, prompt shape, decode length, and hardware. See Benchmark results and Benchmarks for methodology and caveats.

Text model	M1 Ultra mlxcel	M5 Max mlxcel	M5 Max mlx-lm	mlxcel / mlx-lm
SmolLM-135M 4bit	375 tok/s	917 tok/s	712 tok/s	129%
Llama 3.1 8B 4bit	108 tok/s	117 tok/s	117 tok/s	100%
Qwen2.5 7B 4bit	113 tok/s	126 tok/s	124 tok/s	102%
Gemma 2B 4bit	196 tok/s	215 tok/s	223 tok/s	96%
Gemma 3 4B 4bit	117 tok/s	183 tok/s	182 tok/s	101%
Gemma 2 2B 4bit	166 tok/s	241 tok/s	242 tok/s	100%
Phi-3.5-mini 4bit	164 tok/s	203 tok/s	208 tok/s	98%
Jamba v0.1 4bit (hybrid SSM)	122 tok/s	216 tok/s	219 tok/s	99%
Gemma 4 26B-A4B 4bit	80 tok/s	151 tok/s	141 tok/s	107%
Qwen3 MoE 30B 4bit	84 tok/s	176 tok/s	147 tok/s	120%
GLM-4 Flash 4bit	46 tok/s	104 tok/s	104 tok/s	100%
Nemotron-H 30B 4bit	92 tok/s	176 tok/s	179 tok/s	98%
Mixtral 8x7B 4bit	54 tok/s	65 tok/s	66 tok/s	98%
StarCoder2 3B 4bit	166 tok/s	216 tok/s	215 tok/s	100%
Qwen3.5 0.8B 4bit	230 tok/s	504 tok/s	545 tok/s	92%
Qwen3-VL 30B-A3B 4bit, text path	69 tok/s	151 tok/s	147 tok/s	103%
Qwen3-VL 32B 4bit, text path	21 tok/s	27 tok/s	29 tok/s	93%
GPT-OSS 120B 4bit	58 tok/s	114 tok/s	110 tok/s	104%
Solar Open 100B 4bit	33 tok/s	65 tok/s	66 tok/s	98%

VLM model	M1 Ultra mlxcel	M5 Max mlxcel	M5 Max mlx-vlm	mlxcel / mlx-vlm
LLaVA Interleave Qwen 0.5B bf16	265 tok/s	341 tok/s	345 tok/s	99%
Qwen3.5 0.8B 4bit	232 tok/s	454 tok/s	411 tok/s	110%
Qwen3.5 35B-A3B 4bit	75 tok/s	149 tok/s	129 tok/s	116%
Gemma 4 E2B 4bit	106 tok/s	220 tok/s	202 tok/s	109%
Gemma 3n E2B 4bit	73 tok/s	151 tok/s	125 tok/s	121%
InternVL3 1B	238 tok/s	575 tok/s	529 tok/s	109%
Gemma 4 26B-A4B 4bit	70 tok/s	144 tok/s	137 tok/s	105%
Molmo2 4B	60 tok/s	64 tok/s	67 tok/s	96%
Phi 3.5 Vision 4bit	122 tok/s	168 tok/s	160 tok/s	105%

DiffusionGemma (block diffusion)

DiffusionGemma generates a canvas block at a time through iterative denoising rather than left-to-right autoregression. The decode harness above measures inter-token timing, which does not apply to diffusion's burst output, so the automated sweep records this checkpoint as a benchmark failure. The numbers below are a manual same-host comparison (192-token generation, chat template, seed 42, max_denoising_steps=48, median of 3 runs):

Diffusion model	M1 Ultra mlxcel	M1 Ultra mlx-vlm	mlxcel / mlx-vlm
DiffusionGemma 26B-A4B 4bit	32 tok/s	29 tok/s	110%

Released mlx-vlm (0.4.4) does not include diffusion_gemma, so the reference column is mlx-vlm upstream main. The reported tok/s amortizes the per-block denoising passes and is not directly comparable to the autoregressive decode rows above. No M5 Max figure is listed because that comparison was not run on the same-host campaign.

The M5 Max sweep covers 98 text model directories and a matching 98-entry VLM mode pass. Ratio summaries include only rows where both mlxcel and the Python reference produced comparable decode measurements; unsupported checkpoints and benchmark-configuration failures are tracked in the benchmark notes. VLM rows should be read separately because vision preprocessing, processor setup, and prompt construction differ by family. Re-run the benchmark suite on your target hardware before using these numbers for capacity planning.

Supported models

Model support is architecture- and checkpoint-dependent. Run:

mlxcel arch

for the CLI summary, and see Supported models for the maintained architecture table, known limitations, and VLM coverage notes.

Optional GUI

mlxcel-server can be used directly through HTTP clients. For a local graphical front-end, Backend.AI Go can be used as a companion UI for chat, model management, and multi-model routing.

Documentation

• Installation
• Environment variables
• Benchmarks
• Supported models
• Architecture overview
• Tensor and pipeline parallelism
• TurboQuant KV cache
• OpenAI Responses API
• Adding a new model

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the contributor workflow, local quality gates (cargo fmt, clippy, cargo test, cargo deny check), and commit conventions. New model architectures, performance work, bug fixes, and documentation improvements are all useful. For larger changes, please open an issue first so the scope and validation plan can be discussed.

For security vulnerabilities, see SECURITY.md, do not file these as public issues.

License

Apache License 2.0 unless otherwise noted, see LICENSE. Third-party attributions carried forward under Apache-2.0 Section 4(d) are listed in NOTICE.

Acknowledgments

• MLX, Apple's machine learning framework
• mlx-lm (MIT, Copyright 2023 Apple Inc.) and mlx-vlm (MIT, Copyright 2025 Prince Canuma): Python projects whose model coverage and behavior mlxcel ports and mirrors. See NOTICE.
• MLX Community, pre-converted MLX model checkpoints
• turboquant_plus: TurboQuant KV cache compression algorithms ported in src/lib/mlxcel-core/src/cache/turbo/ (Apache-2.0, Copyright 2026 Tom Turney). See NOTICE.