TIL: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/SwapOnZRAM ( last edit oct 2020 ) When I first read this I thought: if you are swapping it's _becasue_ you ran out of ram, so why "swap" to ram? TL:DR; it compresses the data. also: NOT preallocated. David On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 8:18 AM Giles Orr via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
A few days after upgrading the last of my machines from Fedora 32 to 33, I noticed my main machine has acquired a new disk:
NAME SIZE FSTYPE LABEL MOUNTPOINT zram0 4G [SWAP]
I didn't set that up, and I don't think it was there on F32. So the OS has, without asking, co-opted 1/4 of my 16G of RAM to use as swap space. This system has an SSD, so when I initially set it up (Fedora 27), I made a conscious decision to go without swap space. I rarely push the limits of 16G.
But now I'm in the situation that I have only 12G of RAM, so the system will become memory-starved earlier ... and what will it do? It will go to swap. Which is RAM anyway. How does this help? To me this seems like adding complexity without adding utility.
Can someone please explain A) if I'm correct about this behaviour in the first place, and B) why it's useful? Thanks.
-- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- David Thornton https://wiki.quadratic.net https://github.com/drthornt/ https://twitter.com/northdot9/