Author Topic: Niche Application GPU ramdisk  (Read 2801 times)

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Offline msuffidyTopic starter

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Niche Application GPU ramdisk
« on: September 16, 2023, 01:25:43 am »
The other day I was pondering if I could use the memory in my GPU for something like the 95% I am not playing games or using blender. So I was thinking you could use CUDA or openCL to allocate memory and try to make it into a device in Linux or something. So I searched for it and it turns out it already has been made  for Linux. My RTX 3060 has a half decent amount of VRAM (12G) and my system has 32GB.

It exists at this place: https://github.com/Overv/vramfs

So immediately I would expect something that reads and writes a lot of files all the time could benefit from that, or something that stream captures, like video recording may be good with that. In this case, the memory is mounted on the filesystem at some directory as root. I have created a ntfs image in that ramdisk and loopback mounted it as mod 777.

You can just say 4G in this photo but I didn't read the fine print at that time.

« Last Edit: September 16, 2023, 01:30:09 am by msuffidy »
 

Online RoGeorge

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Re: Niche Application GPU ramdisk
« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2023, 07:30:21 am »
Nice!  :-+

Might worth using that when starting many VMs, each with its few GB of RAM.  Otherwise, with 32GB RAM (Ubuntu) I don't recall ever running low on RAM.  If you can measure the kWh over a week or so, with and without the video RAM disk, that would be interesting to compare.

I suspect making use of the video RAM will keep the video card in higher power modes.  A big video card can easily double the consumption of the entire rig, and this might be visible on the electricity bill.  :scared:

Offline Haenk

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Re: Niche Application GPU ramdisk
« Reply #2 on: September 28, 2023, 05:18:58 am »
Interesting idea.
But. RAM should be way faster. And is dirt cheap currently, so I would just upgrade the main memory.

I still have one of those great Hyperdrives, with 32GB DDR1 installed. For that time, it had insane I/Os and satiated the SATA connection.
 


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