NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage Release Notes

NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage Release Notes

Release information for NVIDIA® Magnum IO GPUDirect® Storage.

Release information for NVIDIA® GPUDirect® Storage (GDS) for developers and users.

NVIDIA® Magnum IO GPUDirect® Storage (GDS) is one of the members of the GPUDirect family of technologies. GDS enables a direct data path for direct memory access (DMA) transfers between GPU memory and storage. This direct path increases IO bandwidth, decreases IO latency and reduces the utilization load on the host CPU.

GDS is generally available on third party storage solutions such as DDN EXAScaler®, Dell EMC Isilon, IBM Spectrum Scale, NetApp ONTAP and BeeGFS, WekaFS™, VAST NFS, Dell Isilon, and Micron. See the Support Matrix for the complete list. GDS documents and online resources provide additional context for the optimal use of and understanding of GPUDirect Storage. Refer to the following guides for more information about GDS:

• GPUDirect Storage Design Guide
• GPUDirect Storage Overview Guide
• cuFile API Reference Guide
• GPUDirect Storage Best Practices Guide
• GPUDirect Storage Installation and Troubleshooting Guide
• GPUDirect Storage Benchmarking and Configuration Guide Guide
• GPUDirect Storage O_DIRECT Requirements Guide

To learn more about GDS, refer to the following posts:

• GPUDirect Storage: A Direct Path Between Storage and GPU Memory
• The Magnum IO blog series.

No new features are added in v1.9.1.

Features introduced in previous releases:

v1.9

• Added support for RHEL 9.3 and UB 22.04.3.

v1.8.1

• Added support for RHEL 9.2 on Grace Hopper platform with 64K host OS page size for EXT4 filesystems with Local NVMe.
• Improved the IO throughput performance for applications by adding topology awareness in compatibility mode.

v1.8

• Assorted bug fixes.

v1.7.2

• Added Grace Hopper platform Support with 64K host OS page size for EXT4 filesystems with Local NVMe on Ubuntu 22.04 with HWE kernels.
• Proprietary NVIDIA kernel module is not supported. Only the NVIDIA open kernel module will be supported.
• cuFile APIs can be used in Cloud-service-providers environments in compatibility mode.

v1.7

• Support for APIs cuFileStreamRegister, cuFileStreamDeregister, cuFileReadAsync, and cuFileWriteAsync is complete. This enables use of CUDA Streams with cuFile APIs.
• cuFile APIs can be used with system memory.
• cuFile APIs can now be used with non-O_DIRECT file descriptors.
• Threadpool support is enabled by default and is required for cuFile APIs supporting CUDA streams.

v1.6.1

• Improved batch API performance.
• Implemented threadpool in the cuFile library to enable parallelism and improve throughput of a large IO request using a single user thread.

v1.5.1

• Assorted bug fixes.

v1.5:

• Added support for cuMem* memory allocations with cuFile APIs.

v1.4:

• Hopper PCIe support
• RHEL 9.0 and Ubuntu 22.04 support

v1.3.1:

• GDS can be now installed through CUDA .run files.
• Support for Ubuntu 22.04 and RHEL9.
• Improvements to NIC to GPU affinity for userspace RDMA file systems.

v1.3

• Initial support for Linux dma-buf.

v1.2.1

• GDS now supports vGPU in VMware context. See https://docs.nvidia.com/grid/latest/grid-vgpu-release-notes-generic-linux-kvm/index.html#gpudirect-technology-support and https://docs.nvidia.com/grid/latest/grid-vgpu-user-guide/index.html#cuda-open-cl-support-vgpu for more information.

v1.2

• Support for BeeGFS.
• Support for XFS.
• Batch APIs available for use (Alpha level support).

v1.1.1:

• Use nvidia_peermem default for userspace RDMA filesystems (GPFS, Weka). In order to use nvidia_peermem, load it using:
  Copy

  Copied!

              
  
              
  # modprobe nvidia_peermem
          

• Added support for BeeGFS (preview).

v1.1:

• The XFS file system has been added to the list of supported file systems at a a beta support level.
• Improved support for unregistered buffers.
• Added options start_offset and io_size to gdsio config file per job options.
• Improved performance of 4K and 8K IO sizes for local file systems.
• Added user-configurable priority for internal cuFile CUDA streams.

v1.0:

• New configuration and environment variables for the cuFile library.
• Fixed error handling behavior for Weka retriable and unsupported errors.
• Removed hard dependency on librcu-bp.
• Added read support for IBM Spectrum Scale.

v0.95:

• Compatibility with POSIX IO is enabled by default.

• Alpha level support for RHEL 8.3.

• GDS is available as Technical preview for DGX OS.

• Support for MLNX_OFED 5.3 for NVMe and NVMeOF.

• Support for Excelero™ NVMesh devices.

• Support for ScaleFlux computational storage.

• Integration with DALI and PyTorch.

• Experimental RAPIDS integration for cuDF, unoptimized, reads only.

The following are the MLNX_OFED and filesystem requirements for GDS:

• MLNX_OFED must be installed before installing GDS. Refer to Installing GPUDirect Storage for more information about installing MLNX_OFED.

• nvidia-fs.ko requires Linux kernels 4.15.x and above.

Supported GPUs: Data Center and Quadro (desktop) cards with compute capability > 6 listed here - https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus#compute are supported in GDS mode. All other cards are supported only in compatibility mode.

Partner/Distributed File Systems

GDS has been enabled in the following libraries and frameworks:

• RAPIDS cuDF: More details
• CLARA cuCIM: More details
• DALI: Python frameworks such as PyTorch are enabled to use DALI, which is intern enabled with GDS: More details
• MONAI: Python Framework for Medical Imaging and Deep learning: More details
• Clara Parabricks: More details

The GDS package contains the following Debian packages:

• gds-tools-12-4_*.deb

• libcufile-12-4*.deb

• libcufile-dev-12-4_*.deb

• nvidia-fs_2.19.7.deb

• nvidia-fs-dkms_2.19.*.deb

• nvidia-gds-12-4_*.deb

• nvidia-gds_12-4.*.deb

The following minor updates and bug fixes were made in version 1.9.1:

• nvidia-fs-2.19.7 fixes compilation issues related to newer 6.6 kernels.

• Kernel panics are observed with EXT4 and XFS on RHEL 9.3 for x86 and Grace Hopper platforms.
• The package path anaconda.org/nvidia channel is not supported. It is recommended to install GDS packages using conda-forge channel.
• Starting from Linux kernel 6.6, EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is enforced for nvidia-fs callback functions. NVMe and RPCRDMA kernel patches are not supported with current shipping MLNX_OFED versions. The issue will be fixed in future MLNX_OFED packages.
• The cuFile library can fail to load GPU topology information properly when udev information is not accessible to the application. Ensure the correct udev library is installed.
• Nvidia-fs can deadlock in nv_p2p_dma_map_pages and nv_p2p_mem_info_free_callback functions when the user frees the CUDA memory without calling cuFileBufDeregister on registered buffers.
• For Grace CPU based platform (sbsa), GDS p2p mode IO can fail for registered buffers greater than or equal to 4GB in size.

• On DDN EXAScaler filesystem:

  • With stripe count > 1, cuFileRead and cuFileWrite do not work with poll mode enabled for versions older than 2.12.5_ddn10.
  • With 2.12.5_ddn10, any reads beyond EOF causes a BUG_ON inside nvidia-fs.
• On DGX OS:
  • For log collection, use gds_log_collection.py described in Sending Relevant Data to Customer Support.
• cuFileRead and cuFileWrite APIs fail when working on cuMemMap allocations with multiple GPUS, when the IO request to a GPU buffer is not 4K aligned and spans across multiple GPUs.
• On Grace+Hopper systems:
  • 4K kernel PAGE SIZE is not supported.

This section provides information about the known limitations in this release of GDS.

• vGPU supports the latest GPUs with OpenRM; that is, GPUs with Ada Lovelace, Hopper and later are supported. A100 and earlier GPUs are not supported with OpenRM.
• All OS (BaseOS/RHEL/SLES ) for Grace-Hopper need persistence enabled.
• CUDA streams based APIs:
  • CUDA graphs are not supported with cuFile Stream APIs.
  • cuFile Stream APIs for GPFS and WekaFs are supported in compat mode only.
  • cuFile Stream APIs are not supported when cuFile configuration parameter execution.parallel_io is false or execution.max_io_threads is set to 0.
  • CU_FILE_STREAMS_SUPPORTED bit is not set in Props.fflags when queried with cuFileDriverGetProperties.
• Available BAR1 memory reported by thenvidia-smi utility is not accurate due to some internal overhead of the CUDA toolkit. Therefore, a huge allocation of BAR1 memory by any GDS application can run into ENOMEM errors, even when nvidia-smi utility shows there is available BAR1 memory.
• Batch APIs and poll mode will not work with device files:
  • XFS on RAID is not supported
• GPUDirect storage in P2P mode does not support NVMe end to end data protection features. To support GDS in p2p mode, the NVMe must be formatted with Protection Information where Metadata Sizeis set to zero bytes.
• CentOS 7.x is no longer supported.
• Checksums on the client-side of file systems must be disabled for GDS.
• cuFile APIs are not supported with applications using the fork() system call.
• GDS Compatibility mode is only tested on GDS qualified file systems: ext4, EXAScaler, XFS, WekaFS, IBM Spectrum Scale, VAST, and BeeGFS.
• On x86-64 platforms, GDS with “IOMMU=on” or ACS enabled are not guaranteed to work functionally or in a performant way.
• Refer to the following documentation for IBM Spectrum Scale Limitations with GDS: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/spectrum-scale/5.1.5?topic=architecture-gpudirect-storage-support-spectrum-scale
• Upgrading of Linux Kernel version and nv_peer_mem:

  WekaFS (TM) does not support newer MOFED versions 5.3.x and above with GDS. nvidia-peer-memory-dkms=1.1-0-nvidia2 is required for GDS support with WekaFS. Please follow the instructions in section 2.2 of GDS Troubleshooting and installation guide.

• RHEL 8.3 or later does not have default udev rules for detecting RAID members, which disables GDS on RAID volumes. Refer to the section “Adding udev Rules for RAID Volumes” in GDS Installation and Troubleshooting Guide.

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