In high-performance embedded systems—specifically those involving FPGAs—a common bottleneck is moving massive amounts of data from a reserved DDR memory region to a non-volatile storage device like an NVMe SSD. While the hardware interconnects (PCIe Gen2/Gen3) are theoretically capable of gigabyte-per-second speeds, standard Linux memory access methods often throttle this to a fraction of the hardware’s potential.
This guide explores how to bypass these bottlenecks using the u-dma-buf driver, achieving transfer speeds of up to 12 Gbps with minimal CPU overhead.
The “classic” way to access a reserved RAM region from user space is through /dev/mem. While simple, it is architecturally designed for safety rather than speed.