Kernel Watch
Jon Masters keeps up with all the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to.
Significant ongoing work is happening to support CXL (Compute eXpress Link), which supports more contemporary mechanisms for attaching IO devices to modern systems. Among its various modes, the most popular is .mem (CXL.mem), which effectively allows for serial-attached memory modules much like PCIe plug-in cards as an alternative to DDR. While it won’t replace the bandwidth and latency characteristics of DDR any time soon, CXL.mem is growing in popularity as an additional tier of memory within very large systems. The ongoing work includes updated patches to support new system calls (mempolicy, mbind and so on) intended to improve bandwidth utilisation for processes using CXL memory.