Samsung Electronics and Red Hat are collaborating to drive the growth of the CXL Memory Ecosystem, achieving a significant milestone.

Samsung Electronics, a leading company in advanced memory technology, has announced a successful verification of Compute Express Link (CXL) memory operations in collaboration with open-source software provider Red Hat. This marks the first time that CXL memory operations have been verified in a real user environment, contributing to the expansion of the CXL ecosystem.

The demand for systems with greater memory bandwidth and capacity is increasing due to the exponential growth of data throughput and memory requirements in fields like generative AI, autonomous driving, and in-memory databases. CXL, a unified interface standard, addresses the limitations of existing systems in terms of speed, latency, and expandability by connecting various processors through a PCIe interface. Samsung has been actively working with industry partners to build up the CXL memory ecosystem.

In this latest development, Samsung has optimized its CXL memory for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.3 and verified memory recognition, read, and write operations in Red Hat's KVM and Podman environments. This allows data center clients to easily use Samsung's CXL memory without making additional adjustments to their existing hardware.

The successful verification of Samsung's CXL Memory Expander interoperability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is significant as it expands the applicability of the CXL Memory Expander to IaaS and PaaS-based software provided by Red Hat. This milestone strengthens the integration of hardware and software in building an open-source ecosystem for next-generation memory development.

Samsung and Red Hat are collaborating on a "RHEL 9.3 CXL Memory Enabling Guide" to assist users in utilizing Samsung's CXL memory on RHEL 9.3 and building high-performance computing systems in various user environments.

The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in May 2022 to collaborate on next-generation memory and will continue their efforts through the Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC) in developing CXL open-source and reference models. The partnership covers a range of storage and memory products, including NVMe SSDs, CXL Memory, computational memory/storage, and fabrics.