It’s been a long time in the works, but a memory management feature intended to give machine learning or other GPU-powered applications a major performance boost is close to making it into one of the next revisions of the kernel.
Heterogenous memory management (HMM) allows a device’s driver to mirror the address space for a process under its own memory management. As Red Hat developer Jérôme Glisse explains, this makes it easier for hardware devices like GPUs to directly access the memory of a process without the extra overhead of copying anything. It also doesn’t violate the memory protection features afforded by modern OSes.
Read more at InfoWorld
