An open-source developer has created NBD-VRAM as a way to create swap space on your consumer NVIDIA GPU's video memory under Linux.

Advertised primarily for those with laptops having soldered memory and needing more system memory space while also having a consumer NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU in the laptop, NBD-VRAM provides a pathway to carving out some swap space from that vRAM.

NBD-VRAM was published yesterday and consists of a small daemon to allocate vRAM via the NVIDIA CUDA driver API and then it is exposed using the Linux Network Block Device (NBD) protocol on a Unix socket. Ultimately this path exposes a portion of the NVIDIA GPU vRAM as a conventional Linux swap device.

NBD-VRAM is designed explicitly to work with NVIDIA's consumer GPUs where the NVIDIA P2P API and alternatives do not work. You do need to be running the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack for CUDA support as opposed to using Nouveau/Nova.

Those wishing to learn more about this MIT-licensed NBD-VRAM open-source project can do so via GitHub.