Linux Kernel 6.13 is Released: This is What's New for Compute Express Link (CXL)

How to Confirm Virtual to Physical Memory Mappings for PMem and FSDAX Files

• Steve Scargall
• Linux , Persistent memory

Are you curious whether your application’s memory-mapped files are really using Intel Optane Persistent Memory (PMem), Compute Express Link (CXL) Non-Volatile Memory Modules (NV-CMM), or another DAX-enabled persistent memory device? Want to understand how virtual memory maps onto physical, non-volatile regions? Let’s use easily adaptable scripts in both Python and C to confirm this on your Linux system, definitively.

Why Does This Matter?

With the advent of persistent memory and DAX (Direct Access) filesystems, applications can memory-map files directly onto PMem, bypassing the traditional DRAM page cache. This promises significant performance and durability improvements for data-intensive workloads and databases, such as SQLite, Redis, and others.

A Practical Guide to Identify Compute Express Link (CXL) Devices in Your Server

• Steve Scargall
• How to , Linux

In this article, we will provide four methods for identifying CXL devices in your server and how to determine which CPU socket and NUMA node each CXL device is connected. We will use CXL memory expansion (CXL.mem) devices for this article. The server was running Ubuntu 22.04.2 (Jammy Jellyfish) with Kernel 6.3 and ‘cxl-cli ’ version 75 built from source code. Many of the procedures will work on Kernel versions 5.16 or newer.

My Journey Building a 3MF Native Rust Library from Scratch

• Steve Scargall
• 3 d printing

For the past few years, I’ve been getting more and more into 3D printing as a hobbyist. Like everyone, I started with one, a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon, which has now grown to three printers. I find the hobby fascinating as it entangles software, firmware, hardware, physics, and materials science.

As a software engineer, I’m naturally drawn to the software side of things (Slicer and Firmware). But what interests me most, is how the software interacts with the hardware and the materials. How the slicer translates the 3D model into instructions for the printer (G-Code). How the printer executes those instructions. How the materials behave under the printer’s control.