Responses vLLM backend passes TP environment value as a string
Author: sylvesterkaczmarekCreated Aug 16, 2026Updated Aug 16, 2026
Summary
The Responses API vLLM backend defines tensor parallelism with:
TP = os.environ.get("TP", 2)When TP is unset, the fallback is integer 2. When a user configures the environment variable, os.environ.get() returns a string, and that string is passed directly to:
LLM(..., tensor_parallel_size=TP, ...)tensor_parallel_size is an integer configuration value, so the explicit environment override changes the value's type instead of only changing its size.
Impact
The documented/configurable TP path can fail during vLLM engine setup when users set values such as TP=4, even though the default path works.
Proposed resolution
Parse the environment variable as an integer:
TP = int(os.environ.get("TP", 2))Add a regression that imports the backend with TP=4 and verifies load_model() passes integer 4 to LLM.
Source: openai/gpt-oss