Heterogeneous Memory Management Made It For Linux 4.14

While busy covering the many new features of Linux 4.14, one important change slipped by that I have long been waiting to see merged: Heterogeneous Memory Management.

Thanks to Phoronix reader klim8 for pointing out that HMM did in fact make it for Linux 4.14 and went under my radar.

Heterogeneous Memory Management is the long-time work-in-progress functionality by Jerome Glisse of Red Hat for allowing a process address space to be mirrored and for system memory to be transparently used by any device process.

HMM went through more than 25 code revisions while the core functionality has landed for Linux 4.14. Though this initial work doesn't include the experimental Nouveau bits nor any other big users. But NVIDIA's proprietary driver team has already been looking to make use of HMM so we may see them release a driver update soon in supporting it.

Those wanting to learn more about the internals of HMM in the Linux kernel can see the documentation commit for more information.