Buffer Memory Segmentation - 2023.2 English

Vitis Unified Software Platform Documentation: Application Acceleration Development (UG1393)

Document ID
UG1393
Release Date
2023-12-13
Version
2023.2 English

Allocation and deallocation of memory buffers can lead to memory segmentation in the DDR controllers. This might result in sub-optimal performance of compute units, even if they could theoretically execute in parallel.

This issue occurs most often when multiple pthreads for different compute units are used and the threads allocate and release many device buffers with different sizes every time they enqueue the kernels. In this case, the timeline trace will exhibit gaps between kernel executions and it might seem the processes are sleeping.

Each buffer allocated by runtime should be continuous in hardware. For large memory, it might take some time to wait for that space to be freed, when many buffers are allocated and deallocated. This can be resolved by allocating device buffer and reusing it between different enqueues of a kernel.