vramfs – GPU VRAM based file system for Linux

I don't know if it's esoteric filesystem week on HN, but I love it. [1] Yesterday: TabFS – a browser extension that mounts the browser tabs as a filesystem, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847611 [2] The day before: Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34818040

That's cool but I think the proper solution is to write a Linux kernel module that can reserve GPU RAM via DRM to create ramdisks, not create a userspace filesystem using OpenCL. That would give proper caching, direct mmap support if desired, a reliable, correct and concurrent filesystem (as opposed to this author's "all of the FUSE callbacks share a mutex to ensure that only one thread is mutating the file system at a time"), etc.

It's a cool idea; as other posters have mentioned, there have been other projects mapping VRAM for swap, etc. I'd personally be wary of putting anything too important into VRAM. About five years ago I did a bunch of work testing consumer GPU memory for reliability [1, 2]. Because until that time GPUs were primarily used for error-tolerant applications (graphics) storing only short-lived data (textures) in memory, there wasn't a whole lot of pressure to make sure the memory was…

If it acted as a block device instead of a file system, you could mount it as any filesystem of your choice.