Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
Supporting Peer-to-Peer Memory Devices
Logan Gunthorpe recently posted a patch to support peer-to-peer PCI memory devices. He explained that this is "a PCI card with a BAR space that points to regular memory. This may be an independent PCI card or part of another completely unrelated device (like an IB card or a NVMe card)." A base access register (BAR) is used for addressing memory on the device. Using PCI memory devices as regular system memory may increase the latency between memory transfers as compared with the primary RAM on the system motherboard, but it could come in very handy in cases where the primary RAM starts to be used up.
Logan, however, acknowledged there were caveats to this approach, particularly when dealing with older PCI devices. As a result, he explained, "The code is designed to only utilize the p2pmem device if all the devices involved in a transfer are behind the same PCI switch. Other cases may still work or be desirable for some end users but it was decided this would be the best course of action to prevent users enabling it and wondering why their performance dropped."
Sinan Kaya had some concerns about the portability of Logan's patch. He understood the desire to avoid unexplained performance hits, but he felt that requiring all devices to be behind the same switch was essentially arbitrary and should be left as a policy decision to be made by the user. He said, "I'd rather see the feature enabled by default without any assumptions. Using it with a switch is just a use case that you happened to test."
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
There's a New Linux AI Assistant in Town
Newelle is a Linux AI assistant that can work with different LLMs and includes document parsing and profiles.
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Released with Minor Fixes
The latest Linux kernel doesn't really include any big-ticket features, just a lot of lines of code.
-
EU Sovereign Tech Fund Gains Traction
OpenForum Europe recently released a report regarding a sovereign tech fund with backing from several significant entities.
-
FreeBSD Promises a Full Desktop Installer
FreeBSD has lacked an option to include a full desktop environment during installation.
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.