engineer Bharata Bhasker Rao unveiled the Zen 6 IBS Memory Profiler at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2026 in Prague. This hardware feature samples data memory accesses, providing physical addresses and identifying if data originates from DRAM or CXL.
The profiler feeds samples into the pghot kernel subsystem to track hot pages, replacing traditional page table scanning. In XSBench tests with chips and , the method achieved 4.57x performance over a baseline with no tiering.
While Graph500 results improved to 3.17x, Redis saw no gains and NAS BT lagged slightly. The method reduced per-folio promotion costs to 15.8 microseconds, though overall overhead increased by 5%. The pghot patches currently lack virtualization support.