NBD-VRAM Provides Swap Space On Your NVIDIA GeForce GPUs - Phoronix

Articles & Reviews

News Archive

Forums

Premium Ad-Free<br>Contact

Popular Categories

Close

Articles & Reviews

News Archive

Forums

Premium

Contact

Categories

Computers Display Drivers Graphics Cards Linux Gaming Memory Motherboards Processors Software Storage Operating Systems Peripherals

NBD-VRAM Provides Swap Space On Your NVIDIA GeForce GPUs

Written by Michael Larabel in NVIDIA on 1 June 2026 at 05:57 AM EDT. 8 Comments

An open-source developer has created NBD-VRAM as a way to create swap space on your consumer NVIDIA GPU's video memory under Linux.

Advertised primarily for those with laptops having soldered memory and needing more system memory space while also having a consumer NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU in the laptop, NBD-VRAM provides a pathway to carving out some swap space from that vRAM.

NBD-VRAM was published yesterday and consists of a small daemon to allocate vRAM via the NVIDIA CUDA driver API and then it is exposed using the Linux Network Block Device (NBD) protocol on a Unix socket. Ultimately this path exposes a portion of the NVIDIA GPU vRAM as a conventional Linux swap device.

NBD-VRAM is designed explicitly to work with NVIDIA's consumer GPUs where the NVIDIA P2P API and alternatives do not work. You do need to be running the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack for CUDA support as opposed to using Nouveau/Nova.

Those wishing to learn more about this MIT-licensed NBD-VRAM open-source project can do so via GitHub.

8 Comments

Tweet

NVIDIA Announces RTX Spark Superchip For Laptops & Desktops<br>NVIDIA CUDA 13.3 Rolls Out CUDA Python 1.0, CUDA Tile For C++<br>NVIDIA 610.43.02 Linux Driver Released With Vulkan Improvements, DRM Color Pipeline API<br>DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.2 Further Improves NVIDIA Integration For Steam Play Linux Gaming<br>NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.17 Fixes Support For GB10 Powered Systems<br>NVIDIA Releases CUDA-Oxide 0.1 For Experimental Rust-To-CUDA Compiler

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

FreeBSD Foundation Executive Director Tries Daily Driving FreeBSD On Laptop<br>Intel Introducing USB4STREAM Protocol For Linux - Opening Up Some Nifty Uses For USB4<br>California's Age Verification Law May End Up Exempting Most Linux Distributions<br>KernelScript: A Programming Language For Kernel Customization & App Optimizations<br>Linux Developers Looking At Retiring The x32 ABI<br>Google's ANGLE Merges Wayland Support, Unblocking Chromium Embedded Framework On Wayland<br>Boot-Time Wizard Aims To Help Reduce Linux Boot Times<br>GitHub Copilot & Claude Code Helped With Graphics, WiFi Linux Driver Issues This Week

Intel Preparing WiFi 8 "UHR" Support For Their IWLWIFI Linux Driver

Linux 7.2 Proceeding To Deprecate AF_ALG Due To "Massive Attack Surface", Drops Offloading

Phoronix Marking 22 Years Of Linux Hardware Coverage This Week

Some Elements Of Intel APX Not Proving Beneficial On Nova Lake / Diamond Rapids

NBD-VRAM Provides Swap Space On Your NVIDIA GeForce GPUs

NVIDIA Announces RTX Spark Superchip For Laptops & Desktops

AI-Driven Security Disclosures, NVIDIA Vera & Linux 7.1 Features That Made An Exciting May

Dell Uses Intel Wildcat Lake To Deliver Their Cheapest XPS 13 Ever

Linux 7.1-rc6 Released Following Another "Larger-Than-I'd-Wish-For Size" Week

KDE Linux Prunes Its Insecure & Unused Software

Linux Might Finally Disable The Microsoft RNDIS Protocol Drivers In 2026

Wine-Staging 11.10 Fixes 14 Year Old Bug, Also Fixes Issue Of Some Games Being Too Dark

Servo 0.2 Released With Revamped Android Browser UI

AV2 v1.0 Specification Released For Next-Gen Video Coding

Phoronix Premium allows ad-free access to the site, multi-page articles on a single page, and other features while supporting this site's continued operations.

Intel Xeon 6+ & Intel Ethernet E835 Launch

AMD Announces Radeon RX 9070 GRE, Ryzen AI Max PRO 400 Series

CachyOS Delivers Lead Over Arch Linux, Pop!_OS & Ubuntu On System76 Thelio Major

Cache Aware Scheduling Shows Nice Wins For AMD Zen 5 On PostgreSQL, Valkey, Network Performance

NVIDIA Vera CPU Benchmarks: Olympus Cores Delivering The Best Performance Ever Seen On ARM

The mission at Phoronix since 2004 has centered around enriching the Linux hardware experience. In addition to supporting our site through advertisements, you can help by subscribing to Phoronix Premium. You can also contribute to Phoronix through tips/donations via PayPal or Stripe.

Contact

Michael Larabel

Support Phoronix

While Having Ad-Free Browsing,

Single-Page...