Pinned memory in CUDA

Question

I read somewhere that pinned memory in CUDA is scarce source. What is upper bound on pinned memory? In windows, in linux?

Answer 1

Pinned memory is just physical RAM in your system that is set aside and not allowed to be paged out by the OS. So once pinned, that amount of memory becomes unavailable to other processes (effectively reducing the memory pool available to rest of the OS).

The maximum pinnable memory therefore is determined by what other processes (other apps, the OS itself) are competing for system memory. What processes are concurrently running in either Windows or Linux (e.g. whether they themselves are pinning memory) will determine how much memory is available for you to pin at that particular time.