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Experimental Linux Patches Allow User-Space Peer-To-Peer DMA Between NVMe Drives

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 7 November 2020 at 09:30 AM EST. 8 Comments

A set of Linux kernel patches posted on friday allow peer-to-peer DMA (P2PDMA) transfers between NVMe drives using existing O_DIRECT operations or the NVMe pass-through interface from user-space.

These patches allow for user-space transfers between NVMe solid-state drives in a more efficient manner via P2PDMA. The patches though at the moment are marked "request for comments" and there are some technical issues to overcome around scatter-gather lists (SGLs) and one of the DMA interfaces.

The P2PDMA code works with AMD hardware while Intel support is coming soon and DMA-direct implementations. Other IOMMU implementations like ARM and POWER are forthcoming.

More details on this P2PDMA support between NVMe drives via this patch series.

8 Comments

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About The Author

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.