Google Continues Working On Suspend-Only Swap Spaces For Linux

[mdedetrich]

Don't buy laptops with soldered RAM then. It's your fault.

Most out of touch comment ever, sometimes you don't have a choice and in any case the whole point of Linux is to run in a variety of systems (within reason), and 8gb of RAM is definitely within reason.

it's this kind of attitude that hinders the progress of Linux desktop

[M@GOid]

80's sysadmins coming out of woodworks with their "scripts"... Scripts are unmanageable, non-reusable, eventually unmaintainable. Few lines here, few lines there and suddenly you have an abomination on your hands.

Modern systems are designed to be declarative as much as possible, on all levels. The only place left for scripts is maybe end-user customization.

What are you talking about son? Scripts are great. When the winchester on my micro start making noise I know my scripts are working just fine.

[perpetually high]

What are you talking about son? Scripts are great. When the winchester on my micro start making noise I know my scripts are working just fine.

I have no idea what he's on about. But I just posted my Ubuntu kernel build script in the other thread for those interested. Posting it here because I don't think many will go back to the old comment thread

[binarybanana]

Does Swap ever get used on your systems?

All the time. I've got 16GB+16GB, with a 25% zswap pool and filling half the swap is nothing unusual when I've got my gaming VM running with a heavy compile job running in the background. I do use cgroups to soft-limit how much RAM the portage-spawned processes can use (1GB), which forces them to swap out frequently when RAM is already full. I also have /var/tmp/portage mounted on zram with zstd compression to limit writes to the SSD if possible. That also can lead to a lot of swap use.

In practice I rarely notice anything is going on at all unless both RAM and swap get both close to filled up. At worst task switching is slightly delayed, but not annoyingly so. As long as I stick to a single program it's basically invisible. Only when RAM+swap are full I start to wonder what's going on and see that my system is heavily overcommitted.

This is with swap on nvme btw. Swap on HDD is very different.

[pal666]

zram for normal swap.

zram is waste of ram

[pal666]

RAM is cheap.

swap is cheaper

I bought 64GB of it with my recent Ryzen upgrade. No need for swap.

probably no need for 64gb of memory either. but swap could make your system faster by increasing amount of ram available for caches

[pal666]

with low memory systems, swap can, and maybe should be enabled at all times, no innovation required there.
Only innovation we talk about here is Google's effort to have swap for hibernation only.

disabling of swap is not an innovation, it's a pessimisation. google patch lists security and cheaper hibernation storage as motivations, rather than your crazy ideas

[pal666]

Give me one point from this article which applies to 64GB on desktop

you forbid multitab browsers on desktop? and additionally all your filesystem fits in cache?

[pal666]

in normal use, I have never seen any swap used at all. No matter if I had 4, 8, 16 or 32 GB of ram

you probably define "normal use" as "check quickly after boot". alternatively you've never looked at swap usage, so you've never seen it

[CommunityMember]

yup, but sometimes you have to work with whatever your company gives you.

Technically you have a choice. You can inform your supervisor that you need something better. You can purchase your own device and install the company image (if required). You can leave the company to work somewhere where the supervisor respects the opinions of their staff and supports their needs. If you choose (and it is a choice) to do none of those then you have made a different choice (but you made your choice).