Modern LLM-serving systems reimport OS memory-pressure vocabulary intact — vLLM preempts and recomputes KV cache, and llm-d names cache-eviction churn 'cache thrashing'

The borrow from operating-systems virtual memory into LLM serving (see claim-pagedattention-borrows-os-virtual-memory-paging) did not stop at data-structure design — it carried the OS's failure-mode vocabulary along with it. Under memory pressure, vLLM "can preempt requests… recomputed when sufficient KV cache space becomes available" — the same preemption-and-recomputation strategy operating systems use to survive over-multiprogramming beyond what the working-set model budgets for.

The vocabulary returned by name, not just by mechanism: the LLM-serving platform llm-d describes cache-blind eviction churn directly as "cache thrashing" — "This instability is caused by 'cache thrashing.'" That is Denning's 1968 term, applied to a 2020s GPU memory hierarchy, by engineers who were solving a scarce-fast/abundant-slow memory problem structurally identical to the one multiprogrammed mainframes hit in the 1960s.

The vLLM preemption mechanism is Tier 1 (the PagedAttention system paper); the specific "cache thrashing" naming is sourced to a Tier-3 vendor blog and should be read as evidence of industry usage of the term rather than an independently verified causal claim about llm-d's internals.