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Reminder: Enable ZRAM on your Linux system to optimize RAM usage

31 points by type0

by Kim_Bruning

2 subcomments

by ChocolateGod

0 subcomment

You only want to use zram if you've got no swap device (e.g. a raspberry pi).
If you do, you'll want zswap instead.

by rcxdude

0 subcomment

What's old is new again: I remember various hacks like this being popular in early android ROMs because the first android phones really didn't have enough RAM to support the OS well.

by cromka

0 subcomment

Asahi devs initially enabled ZRAM by default and then disabled it, now recommending against it, quoting instabilities and random weirdness.

by esperent

1 subcomments

I've heard ZRAM mentioned before and I've just spent 5 minutes reading articles on it... Which is about the maximum I have time for these days when it comes to esoteric linux internals.
What's the downside? Does it use much CPU?
If I have enough RAM already, should I still enable it?
One article says it can be mapped to /tmp to reduce i/o. Is that a good idea?
This article is light on all of these kind of details.

by iberator

1 subcomments

I remember that back in around 2007 i was able to somehow mount a graphical card (ati similar to geforce2?) memory directly in Linux, and put my swap file there :); Great times. Slackware 8.1 i think.
as for zram: somehow i dislike it. Nowdays ram is plenty and if not: better to have fast OOM than chug of death with swap.
I also remember running NetBSD 1.3.1 and Slackware 3 on 386SZ 26MHZ with 2 mb of ram (nowadays hard limit is 4mb to boot due the large memory pages on x86 afik)