NVIDIA/gdrcopy

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1412 stars · 194 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

GDRCopy is a low-latency GPU memory copy library built on NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA technology, allowing CPU-driven copies between host and GPU memory with minimal overhead. It includes a kernel-mode driver, a user-space API for mapping GPU memory as host-accessible memory, and benchmark/test applications for bandwidth, latency, and API performance.

Use cases

• copy data between CPU and GPU with very low latency
• map GPU memory into the host address space for direct CPU access
• reduce cudaMemcpy overhead for small transfers
• measure GPU memory copy bandwidth and latency
• run ping-pong latency tests between GPU and CPU
• sanity-test GPUDirect RDMA driver and library installation
• build HPC or networking applications that touch GPU memory from the host

When to choose

• You need low-latency host-to-device transfers and cudaMemcpy's 6-7us overhead is too high
• You run Linux with an NVIDIA Data Center or RTX GPU (Kepler or newer) and can install a DKMS kernel module
• You want CPU mappings of GPU memory for direct reads/writes or for wiring GPU memory into RDMA-capable NICs
• You need to benchmark or validate GPU memory copy performance

When to avoid

• You need maximum device-to-host bandwidth - GPU BAR mappings cannot be prefetched, so D-H reads are slow; use cudaMemcpy for bulk transfers
• You are on Windows or macOS - GDRCopy is Linux-only
• You cannot or do not want to install kernel modules (DKMS/kmod) on your system
• You use consumer GeForce GPUs, which do not support GPUDirect RDMA

Facets

library · maturity active

gpu-computing benchmarking gpu-computing hardware performance developer-tools c cli gpudirect-rdma gpu-memory cuda nvidia kernel-module dma low-latency memory-copy hpc host-device-transfer dkms linux gpu

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