The DMA Streaming Framework: Kernel-Level Buffer Orchestration for High-Performance AI Data Paths

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Graziano, Marco
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Graziano, Marco
author_facet Graziano, Marco
contents AI transport libraries move bytes efficiently, but they commonly assume that buffers are already correctly allocated, placed, shared, registered, and safe under completion and teardown pressure. This paper presents dmaplane, a Linux kernel module that makes this missing layer explicit as buffer orchestration. dmaplane exposes a stable kernel UAPI via /dev/dmaplane and composes ring-based command channels, DMA buffer lifecycle management, dma-buf export for cross-device sharing, a kernel-space RDMA engine, NUMA-aware allocation and verification, credit-based flow control, low-overhead observability, and GPU memory integration via PCIe BAR pinning. We evaluate orchestration sensitivity with measurements of NUMA cross-node penalties at DRAM scale, completion-safe flow control under sustained RDMA load, and GPU BAR mapping tiers versus cudaMemcpy. We also demonstrate end-to-end disaggregated inference by transferring KV-cache chunks between two machines using RDMA WRITE WITH IMMEDIATE and reconstructing tensor views on the receiver. RDMA measurements use Soft-RoCE; we distinguish measured results from provider-independent properties by construction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_10030
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The DMA Streaming Framework: Kernel-Level Buffer Orchestration for High-Performance AI Data Paths
Graziano, Marco
Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
AI transport libraries move bytes efficiently, but they commonly assume that buffers are already correctly allocated, placed, shared, registered, and safe under completion and teardown pressure. This paper presents dmaplane, a Linux kernel module that makes this missing layer explicit as buffer orchestration. dmaplane exposes a stable kernel UAPI via /dev/dmaplane and composes ring-based command channels, DMA buffer lifecycle management, dma-buf export for cross-device sharing, a kernel-space RDMA engine, NUMA-aware allocation and verification, credit-based flow control, low-overhead observability, and GPU memory integration via PCIe BAR pinning. We evaluate orchestration sensitivity with measurements of NUMA cross-node penalties at DRAM scale, completion-safe flow control under sustained RDMA load, and GPU BAR mapping tiers versus cudaMemcpy. We also demonstrate end-to-end disaggregated inference by transferring KV-cache chunks between two machines using RDMA WRITE WITH IMMEDIATE and reconstructing tensor views on the receiver. RDMA measurements use Soft-RoCE; we distinguish measured results from provider-independent properties by construction.
title The DMA Streaming Framework: Kernel-Level Buffer Orchestration for High-Performance AI Data Paths
topic Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10030