Reverse-engineering NVIDIA's cuda-checkpoint for Faster Cold Starts

Reverse-engineering Nvidia's CUDA-checkpoint for faster cold starts

I dug into NVIDIA's hidden cuda-checkpoint feature to understand why GPU state transfers rarely saturate PCIe bandwidth. By tracing the closed-source driver, I discovered that a background thread inside the target process handles the entire serialization, moving device memory directly into host memory without external intervention.

"As far as the kernel driver is concerned, this process is no longer using a GPU."