AMD engineer Bharata Bhasker Rao unveiled the IBS Memory Profiler at Linux Plumbers Conference 2026 in Prague. The new Zen 6 feature adds a lightweight Instruction-Based Sampling instance that captures only data memory accesses, reporting physical addresses and whether data originates from DRAM or CXL. This aids tiered‑memory servers where hot pages must be promoted to DRAM.
AMD plans to integrate profiler samples with the proposed pghot kernel subsystem for hot‑page tracking. Benchmarks on a 256‑CPU, 256 GB CXL system show mixed results: XSBench improved 4.57× vs. 1.18× baseline, Graph500 rose 3.17× vs. 2.34×, while Redis saw no gain and NAS BT lagged slightly. Overhead tests reduced per‑folio promotion cost from 26.1 µs to 15.8 µs, though overall benchmark speed dropped ~5 %.
Virtualization support is not yet listed, and the pghot patches remain under development. AMD’s EPYC 9006 “Venice” chips, supporting CXL 3.1, are in production with cloud rollouts expected this year.
Source: TechPowerUp News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing