Can ipmctl discover an emulated PMem

[fyc]

I've created an emulated PMem with DRAM, and I want to set the memory mode for that. I installed the ipmctl, but the emulated PMem cannot be discovered by ipmctl.
Can ipmctl discover an emulated PMem?
Is there any other way to set the emulated PMem to memory mode?

[SteveScargall · Accepted solution]

Hi @fyc 

Memory Mode is a memory controller feature baked into the CPU silicon that cannot be emulated. Emulation of PMem is intended for AppDirect development and functional testing use cases only. The `ipmctl` utility works only with physical Intel Optane Persistent Memory modules, not emulated PMem which is a feature of the Kernel or QEMU.

Memory Mode is transparent to the OS so if your working set size fits in DRAM, you get DRAM performance, which is no different than using DRAM only. You can't emulate DRAM misses that need to go to PMem to read the data, sorry.