Making the Linux 3.11 kernel an even more exciting release was the merger on Wednesday of the Zswap support. Per the Linux kernel documentation, "Zswap is a lightweight compressed cache for swap pages. It takes pages that are in the process of being swapped out and attempts to compress them into a dynamically allocated RAM-based memory pool. zswap basically trades CPU cycles for potentially reduced swap I/O. This trade-off can also result in a significant performance improvement if reads from the compressed cache are faster than reads from a swap device."
Among potentially beneficial scenarios are desktop/laptops with limited RAM, overcommitted virtualization guests sharing common I/O resources, and users with SSDs as swap devices can extend their devices life by shortening writes. With the Kconfig ZSWAP support for Zswap enabled, it's just a matter of setting zswap.enabled=1 as a kernel module parameter.
As part of the Zswap work, Zbud was also added to the kernel tree for 3.11. Zbud is a special purpose memory allocator for storing compressed pages. This allocator is a rewrite of the Zbud code found in Zcache.
The merge to mainline of Zswap happened with this commit. "Zswap is a thin backend for frontswap that takes pages that are in the process of being swapped out and attempts to compress them and store them in a RAM-based memory pool."
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