USM turns idle NVIDIA VRAM into Linux swap, ~9 µs vs 55 µs on NVMe
kha333n · reddit · 2026-11-06
Developer kha333n open-sourced USM, a user-space tool that turns a laptop's idle NVIDIA VRAM into the top-priority Linux swap device. A daemon borrows VRAM via the CUDA driver API and serves it through ublk — no kernel module, works with Secure Boot. With lz4 compression, 5.5 GiB of VRAM holds 16 GiB of app memory; page faults run 9 µs versus 55 µs plus overhead on a DRAM-less NVMe. An overload test (8×1.5 GiB apps on 8 GiB RAM) hung zram in 3 of 6 runs but the VRAM tier in 0 of 4. usm off returns the VRAM in seconds, with a disk swap file as fallback. Beta, NVIDIA-only, tested on Ubuntu 26.04; most of the code was written by Claude Code.
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