Unified KV Pooling to Accelerate Long-Context LLM Serving

Abstract: Long-context LLM serving requires offloading KV caches to host-memory and SSDs, but existing mechanisms are not designed for such long contexts. We observe significant inefficiencies in current KV caching in long contexts: high serving latency ~30.7 s, exceeding the typical TTFT requirement of 10 s by more than 3x. Our in-depth analysis explains two major reasons: (1) retrieval is serialized through host-memory and SSD, leaving other host-memory modules and SSDs underutilized, and (2) SSD-based KV retrieval spends 84% of its time in the kernel filesystem rather than actual device access. To address the problems, we propose unified KV pooling, which aggregates multiple host-memory modules and SSDs into a single logical pool and distributes KV caches across devices based on their bandwidth. To eliminate the filesystem overhead, we design KV-passthrough, which bypasses the kernel filesystem and directly accesses SSD-resident KV caches from user space via SPDK. Across evaluations on LLaMA 3.1-8B, GPT-OSS-20B, and Qwen3-30B-A3B, unified KV pooling reduces TTFT in long-contexts ~4.1x over state-of-the-art techniques, all making under 10 s. It also reduces blocked I/O time by up to 23.2x by eliminating filesystem overhead.