VRAMi

VRAMi is a conceptual interface for managing GPU video RAM (VRAM) in virtualized and multi-tenant computing environments. It proposes a standardized set of operations that allow software to allocate, map, and manage VRAM resources across processes, containers, or virtual machines while maintaining isolation and security.

The aim of VRAMi is to improve utilization of VRAM, reduce fragmentation, and enable quality-of-service guarantees so that diverse workloads—such as real-time rendering, cloud gaming, and AI inference—can share a single GPU efficiently.

In a VRAMi-enabled system, a host driver or hypervisor would implement VRAMi primitives, interfacing with hardware features such as IOMMU for address translation and GPU PCIe engines for memory access. The model would support dynamic allocation and deallocation, page-level mapping, and protection domains to prevent cross-tenant access. It would also provide mechanisms for synchronization, fault handling, and possible live migration of VRAM allocations between hosts.

Use cases include cloud gaming platforms that need predictable latency and memory isolation, AI workloads that require large VRAM footprints across multiple containers, and professional rendering pipelines in data centers.

Status and challenges: VRAMi is not an established standard; it appears mainly in speculative discussions and product roadmaps. Realization would require hardware support, software stack integration, and consensus on APIs to avoid compatibility fragmentation. Potential issues include added latency, complexity of memory management, and security risks from sharing GPU memory. See also: GPU virtualization, memory virtualization, multi-instance GPUs.