Heterogeneous Memory Management Is Maturing, AMDGPU Support Coming

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Heterogeneous Memory Management Is Maturing, AMDGPU Support Coming

For the past four years now we have been monitoring the development of Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) for allowing the mirroring of process address spaces and other functionality particularly designed around modern GPU compute needs but also applicable to other devices/drivers. The HMM kernel code was merged to mainline last year while haven't seen much activity by the DRM drivers but that now seems to be changing...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HMM-2018-XDC-Coming

[Creak]

Hi Michael,
It would be awesome if you could have some kind of glossary for all the Linux terms (HMM, DRM, DMA, IOMMU, etc. just to name a few from this article). Not just to know the acronyms definition, but mainly to know what's hidden behind these terms/features: who would be interested by them? what it could bring to the users in the future? where to have more info on it? etc.

I think that would help a lot the new readers (or occasional readers) to really grasp the importance of this or that news.

[tildearrow]

Typo:

Some recent HMM improvements being worked on incluide generic page write protection,

[cb88]

Hi Michael,
It would be awesome if you could have some kind of glossary for all the Linux terms (HMM, DRM, DMA, IOMMU, etc. just to name a few from this article). Not just to know the acronyms definition, but mainly to know what's hidden behind these terms/features: who would be interested by them? what it could bring to the users in the future? where to have more info on it? etc.

I think that would help a lot the new readers (or occasional readers) to really grasp the importance of this or that news.

Why... the only new one is HMM. The rest are terms anyone familiar with Linux graphics should already know and are documented elsewhere.

[Creak]

The rest are terms anyone familiar with Linux graphics should already know

Not everyone coming to Phoronix already know everything about the Linux graphics stack (nor virtualization).
Phoronix being the go-to website for anything related to graphics in Linux (and even a bit more), I think it would be nice to add that kind of knowledge to the database.

[Adarion]

Hi Michael,
It would be awesome if you could have some kind of glossary for all the Linux terms...

Indeed, a comprehensive (and up to date) list somewhere would be fortunate. There are a lot of abbreviations, and not everyone is a GPU related coding crack.
E.g. I have a lot of abbreviations in my field of science, and they sound similar, but are something totally different.

from the few mentioned:
HMM - heterogeneous memory management
DRM - in Linux graphics it is direct rendering manager (as part of the DRI direct rendering infrastructure to accelerate graphics being put on the screen), in computer "politics" it's digital restrictions management
DMA - direct memory access (used by all sorts of devices like ISA/PCI cards, HDDs (controllers), it improves latencies and troughput and takes off a lot of load from the CPU)
IOMMU - I/O (input/output) Memory Management Unit, introduced to normal PCs by AMD with their AMD64 architecture around 2009