AMD Sends Out Latest Patches For HMM-Based SVM Memory Manager

Published back in January was the initial work on a HMM-based SVM memory manager for the open-source Radeon compute stack. A second version of that work is now available as it continues working towards the mainline kernel.

This Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) memory manager implementation makes use of the Linux kernel's modern Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) code. As part of working on continuing to advance their ROCm compute stack and preparing for their big HPC/super-computer deployments using a combination of AMD EPYC CPUs and Radeon GPUs, this SVM memory manager is being worked on. This work is critical for heterogeneous computing in letting the GPU transparently access program addresses coherently with the CPU.

With the "v2" implementation of the AMD kernel driver's HMM-based SVM memory manager there is a lot of changed code over the past three months and addressing some of the earlier shortcomings / work-in-progress areas from the initial patches. The code as well has been cleaned up.

The 44 patches providing this HMM-based SVM memory manager for the AMDKFD kernel code can be found on the mailing list. From there is also branched in-development ROCm user-space code for exercising the new kernel interface.