From Tensor Buffer to Distributed Memory Hierarchy: A Survey of KV Cache Management for LLM Serving
The key-value (KV) cache has become a first-order memory object in LLM serving rather than a temporary per-request tensor. This survey classifies more than thirty KV-management systems and frameworks using four axes: locality, lifetime, ownership, and substrate. The axes reveal five architectural archetypes -- local-paged, disaggregated-pipeline, shared-store, memory-pool, and hybrid-tier. Once workload and hardware are fixed, ownership accounts for much of the remaining design variance among distributed systems. The survey also audits current evaluations and identifies seven missing KV-specific measurements, linking them to open problems in fault tolerance, isolation, tiered eviction, sp...
| Authors | Jie Li, Tongyang Wang, Yong Chen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.DC |
| Published | 30 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 June 2026 |
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