Open Source Summit Japan

The "software defined" buzzword, to a Linux kernel developer, implies infrastructure that allows an application to bypass the kernel's general purpose interfaces and policies to compose a solution tailored to a specific use case. As performance and feature-differentiated memory technologies, like high-bandwidth memory and persistent memory, continue to proliferate the kernel needs a mechanism to hand out dedicated and predictable access to applications purpose built to leverage these new memory types. The DAX mechanism in general, and the Device-DAX interface in particular, allow an application direct-access to memory ranges bypassing the page cache and filesystem. This presentation gives an overview of the Device-DAX capability and how it might be used as a building block for software defined memory management.