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Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux

8.6 relevance
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technical depth
9
novelty
9
actionability
8
community
9
strategic
7
personal
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Using NVIDIA VRAM as swap on Linux is a highly novel and actionable hack for GPU-constrained environments.

Open Source github.com
Use your NVIDIA GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux. Built for laptops with soldered memory and no upgrade path. If you have an RTX card sitting there with 8GB of VRAM and you're getting swap...
Summary

nbd-vram repurposes idle NVIDIA GPU VRAM as Linux swap via CUDA memory transfers and the NBD protocol, tripling addressable memory to ~46GB on a 16GB+8GB hybrid laptop setup. It avoids the NVIDIA P2P API (restricted to Quadro/datacenter cards) and requires no kernel module, surviving driver and kernel updates. Includes power-aware management that stops swap on battery and restarts on AC.

Author

c0deJedi