Re:A Driver on the GPU
by ianlevesque on Thursday April 28, 2022 @07:45PM
(#31199630)
Is this what DirectStorage does?
No. DirectStorage is mostly about addressing the major problems that make disk IO so much slower on Windows than Linux: cloning io_uring and bypassing some of the overhead in the filesystem stack. Optionally, DirectStorage can enable offloading decompression to the GPU, and I think it also optionally supports using P2P DMA to transfer data directly from the SSD to VRAM. Having IO commands actually originate from the GPU is way out of scope, because you can't safely let a userspace application directly construct and submit commands to a drive that holds a filesystem managed by the OS.
> Build userspace NVMe drivers and storage applications with CUDA support
> libnvm can be linked with CUDA programs, enabling high-performance storage access directly from your CUDA kernels. This is achieved by placing IO queues and data buffers directly in GPU memory, eliminating the need to involve the CPU in the IO path entirely.