[GTALUG] Fedora 33 uses RAM for swap?

[David Thornton]

TIL: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/SwapOnZRAM ( last edit oct 2020
)

When I first read this I thought: if you are swapping it's _becasue_ you
ran out of ram, so why "swap" to ram?

TL:DR; it compresses the data.

also: NOT preallocated.

David



On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 8:18 AM Giles Orr via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> A few days after upgrading the last of my machines from Fedora 32 to
> 33, I noticed my main machine has acquired a new disk:
>
> NAME               SIZE FSTYPE      LABEL    MOUNTPOINT
> zram0                4G                      [SWAP]
>
> I didn't set that up, and I don't think it was there on F32.  So the
> OS has, without asking, co-opted 1/4 of my 16G of RAM to use as swap
> space.  This system has an SSD, so when I initially set it up (Fedora
> 27), I made a conscious decision to go without swap space.  I rarely
> push the limits of 16G.
>
> But now I'm in the situation that I have only 12G of RAM, so the
> system will become memory-starved earlier ... and what will it do?  It
> will go to swap.  Which is RAM anyway.  How does this help?  To me
> this seems like adding complexity without adding utility.
>
> Can someone please explain A) if I'm correct about this behaviour in
> the first place, and B) why it's useful?  Thanks.
>
> --
> Giles
> https://www.gilesorr.com/
> gilesorr at gmail.com
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-- 
David Thornton
https://wiki.quadratic.net
https://github.com/drthornt/
https://twitter.com/northdot9/
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