Linux Zswap Still Aiming For Compressed Swap Caching

[oibaf]

Can someone with some insight relate how Zswap differs from zRam? Sounds like the only difference is zSwap compresses memory as its being written to swap (if I understand correctly), while zRam uses a separate "compressed ram swap" before falling back to the standard swap...

See also the comment here:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/fe313521-2e95-46f2-817d-44a4f27eba32/entry/new_linux_zswap_compression_functionality7?lang=en

[gururise]

Can someone with some insight relate how Zswap differs from zRam? Sounds like the only difference is zSwap compresses memory as its being written to swap (if I understand correctly), while zRam uses a separate "compressed ram swap" before falling back to the standard swap...

[Ericg]

You could always swap the old ones for bigger ones?

Some (like mine) are soldered to the board, yay ultrabooks

[varikonniemi]

This is definitely a good technology, if it works. I have no idea of the amount of code this adds to the kernel, and how critical sneaky bugs it may yield. And more code = more errors.

Also,

Some of us have laptops and cannot upgrade the memory since there aren't enough slots.

You could always swap the old ones for bigger ones?

[frign]

TBH, I really never saw the purpose of swap-caches.
Before you start a rant, I want to clear up that, when you have enough RAM, you don't really need a Swap-Partition.
Moreover, it wears out SSD-drives which should be avoided. Considering memory has turned very cheap in the last few years, I myself really recommend you to just buy your 16Gb-sticks and are good to go without putting to much IO-load on your hard-drive.
Even when you use a distribution like Gentoo, you can easily turn the Makeopts to 8 simultaneous tasks (on i7) without reaching the memory limit (only 8 Gb Max.).

Nevertheless, compressing the swap-file is a great concept and I am looking forward to what it will bring.

If you have a completely different opinion on this topic, please let me know!

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Zswap Still Aiming For Compressed Swap Caching

A second version of the Zswap patch-set for the Linux kernel was published this week. The Zswap patches provide compressed swap caching support to compress pages in the process of being swapped and compresses them into a dynamically allocated RAM-backed memory pool...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI3MTA