Memory on graphics card

[curaga]

Or if the card has something way overkill, like anything above 512mb, why would it be a bad idea to use it for swap?

(ref overkill for my uses, my display is 1600x900)

[agd5f]

Reading from vram with the CPU is REALLY slow.

[agd5f]

Also, you can never have enough vram. LOTS of pixamps get stored in vram (especially when running a compositor), so you are probably using more than you think.

[bridgman]

I wouldn't want to swap to VRAM on a card I was also using for graphics - in addition to the issues related to sharing VRAM you would also be sharing BAR address space, which might be an even bigger problem.

I guess swapping to an unused graphics card would still be OK but not sure whether the driver would set things up properly if there was no display attached.

[kadambi]

It works!! I tested it on F14 alpha and it works great.

dmesg confirms the full memory usage:

radeon 0000:01:00.0: VRAM: 512M 0x00000000 - 0x1FFFFFFF (512M used)
[drm] Detected VRAM RAM=512M, BAR=256M
[drm] radeon: 512M of VRAM memory ready
[drm] vram apper at 0xD0000000

[devius]

It works!! I tested it on F14 alpha and it works great.

Nice to see that after 2 years your problem is solved So, this has been a problem ever since Fedora 10 up to now?

[nanonyme]

Reading from vram with the CPU is REALLY slow.

Slower than reading from hard disk?

[kadambi]

Nice to see that after 2 years your problem is solved So, this has been a problem ever since Fedora 10 up to now?

Well, this was a new feature essentially. Without KMS and memory manager, you can't address beyond PCI BAR address (256MB). With memory manager now in place, it works fine.

[marek]

Slower than reading from hard disk?

Maybe on AGP.