Merge pull request #16435 from rapidsai/branch-24.08

Forward-merge branch-24.08 into branch-24.10

docs/cudf/source/cudf_pandas/how-it-works.md

@@ -36,3 +36,19 @@ transfers.
 When using `cudf.pandas`, cuDF's [pandas compatibility
 mode](api.options) is automatically enabled, ensuring consistency with
 pandas-specific semantics like default sort ordering.
+
+`cudf.pandas` uses a managed memory pool by default. This allows `cudf.pandas` to process datasets larger than the memory of the GPU it is running on. Managed memory prefetching is also enabled by default to improve memory access performance. For more information on CUDA Unified Memory (managed memory), performance, and prefetching, see [this NVIDIA Developer blog post](https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/improving-gpu-memory-oversubscription-performance/).
+
+Pool allocators improve allocation performance. Without using one, memory
+allocation may be a bottleneck depending on the workload. Managed memory
+enables oversubscribing GPU memory. This allows cudf.pandas to process
+data larger than GPU memory in many cases, without CPU (Pandas) fallback.
+
+Other memory allocators can be used by changing the environment
+variable `CUDF_PANDAS_RMM_MODE` to one of the following.
+
+1. "managed_pool" (default): CUDA Unified Memory (managed memory) with RMM's asynchronous pool allocator.
+2. "managed": CUDA Unified Memory, (managed memory) with no pool allocator.
+3. "async": CUDA's built-in pool asynchronous pool allocator with normal CUDA device memory.
+4. "pool": RMM's asynchronous pool allocator with normal CUDA device memory.
+5. "cuda": normal CUDA device memory with no pool allocator.