AMD Engineer Talks Up New IBS Memory Profiler Feature Found On Zen 6

One of the AMD Zen 6 CPU features that hasn't been talked about too widely beyond appearing in a public AMD tech doc is the IBS Memory Profiler. This week in Prague at LPC 2026 an AMD engineer talked up Zen 6's IBS Memory Profiler and its benefits for hot page detection and promotion on Linux systems. AMD engineer Bharata Bhasker Rao presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference on the IBS Memory Profiler that is new to Zen 6. This Instruction-Based Sampling Memory Profiler provides for lightweight memory access profiling on a per-access basis for virtual and physical addresses and source/target NUMA node tracking. The AMD IBS Memory Profiler can be used for providing the Linux kernel with hints around hot page detection and promotion, namely for AMD EPYC servers with tiered memory storage such as conventional DRAM and CXL-based memory solutions. The AMD IBS Memory Profiler is being worked on for integration with Linux's pghot subsystem patches for hot page promotion and ultimately can work across different CPUs/vendors that expose capabilities for CPU-level sampling mechanisms. Benchmark numbers from a 256-core AMD EPYC Venice server show IBS Memory Profiler indeed having low overhead when engaging it via pghot for hardware hints. The pghot work is still ongoing but we'll see how this ends up evolving as it reaches the mainline Linux kernel. Those wishing to go through the presentation assets on the AMD Zen 6 IBS Memory Profiler as it pertains to Linux can find all the content via the Linux Plumbers Conference site.