[2606.11158] Defeat the Heap: Zero-Copy Data Movement in AXI4MLIR

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Computer Science > Hardware Architecture

arXiv:2606.11158 (cs)

[Submitted on 9 Jun 2026]

Title:Defeat the Heap: Zero-Copy Data Movement in AXI4MLIR

Authors:Elam Cohavi, Nicolas Bohm Agostini, Jude Haris, Antonino Tumeo, David Kaeli, José Cano<br>View a PDF of the paper titled Defeat the Heap: Zero-Copy Data Movement in AXI4MLIR, by Elam Cohavi and 5 other authors

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Abstract:As custom hardware accelerators become increasingly central to machine learning workloads, efficient data transfer is critical for maximizing accelerator performance on linear algebra kernels. AXI4MLIR, an extension of the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) compiler framework for automated generation of host-accelerator driver code, incurs significant runtime overhead due to non-zero-copy CPU-accelerator data movement. During transfers from the host to the accelerator, data is copied from heap-allocated memory buffers into contiguous Direct Memory Access (DMA)-mapped buffers. This work identifies this copy as a redundant staging operation and eliminates it through zero-copy data movement. The optimization extends accel, an MLIR dialect introduced by AXI4MLIR, and implements lowering support that allocates buffers directly within DMA-mapped memory, thereby omitting the staging copy. We evaluate the proposed scheme using a configurable matrix-matrix multiplication accelerator and show that the zero-copy optimization reduces main memory data movement by up to 2x, increasing overall accelerator utilization.

Comments:<br>Accepted to the 7th Compilers for Machine Learning Workshop (C4ML), co-located with CGO 2026

Subjects:

Hardware Architecture (cs.AR); Programming Languages (cs.PL)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2606.11158 [cs.AR]

(or<br>arXiv:2606.11158v1 [cs.AR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.11158

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history<br>From: José Cano [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Tue, 9 Jun 2026 17:40:13 UTC (81 KB)

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