Using an NVidia graphics card as extra RAM when not running AI

Running Linux? Got an Nvidia card sitting idle? Hitting RAM limits and swapping to disk? Don't want to spend an arm and a leg on more RAM?

Turn your NVidia card into overflow swap RAM with
https://github.com/c0deJedi/nbd-vram

This spins up a systemctl daemon that converts a few gigabytes of your graphics card VRAM into regular RAM. (the size is configurable, and it's only in effect while the daemon is running.)

This would not make a GPU-powered AI any faster; you'd still be throttled by the PCI-e bus.

But it did allow me, when not using my card for AI, to have a video game running on the same graphics card, Discord, and a plethora of Google Chrome tabs open, without my system stuttering on constant disk swaps. And that has made the RAM shortage more tolerable than it was before.

(I didn't write the code, but I have been using it daily for the last 2 months, with plenty of sleep -> wake cycles, and so long as your disk swap file is at least as big as the VRAM swap allocation, it has been suspending and resuming just fine thanks to a recent fix.)

Current specs:

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (11 GB vram, 5GB of which are being used as swap)

16 GB DDR4