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tumblestick

3 karma · joined November 12, 2024

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tumblestick··on Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
It's true that Linux kernel is the throughput bottleneck. Unfortunately, the optimizations described above aren't sufficient to get within even 10% of hardware bandwidth.

Even if the swap system overhead drops to just a data copy, the memory management layer prevents swap from scaling to higher bandwidths. The issue is not data movement; it is in the page unmapping step (which requires expensive TLB shootdowns). Larger kernel changes are required.

My group wrote a paper on this: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3731569.3764842

Linux's swap system is undergoing some large refactors lately. Hopefully some insights either from our work or Hermit (NSDI '23) can make it in to the mainline. I think Hermit's `rmap` optimization in particular is a candidate for upstream use.

tumblestick··on Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages
Hi Rithwik -- great work. My Nana would have been thrilled to know this was possible :)

If I can ask -- what program did you use to generate the code maps in your article?