Zram is an alternative on Linux to swap partitions or swap files

zram

For some distros this is even becoming the default. Fact is swapping to SSD drives can speed up their demise, and swapping to drives is slower than to RAM. Zram creates a compressed block device in memory and swaps to that.

So no creation of swap partitions or files, and this is probably better suited for those with 16 GB or more of RAM, although they do mention working with far smaller sizes.

The linked article is the one that really brought this to my attention, but looking deeper I realised there is more than one way of configuring this, so you may want to dig around first for more information and ensure you follow something fairly recent.

In the end, for my Manjaro setup I opted to install the zram-generator package (also look at their Github project page for info), and went with the default config file (you just need to copy it to /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf, except for setting the host-memory-limit to none and disabling the zswap1 device creation. Well, hope that was correct, but the device is created and reporting, so I assume it is all good now.

See https://opensource.com/article/22/11/customize-zram-linux

#technology #Linux #zram #swap #opensource