[Arm-dev] Using zram-swap

[Fred Gleason]

On Oct 12, 2018, at 12:25, Gordan Bobic <gordan at redsleeve.org> wrote:

> Because swapping to SD card is slow, swapping to zram is fast, and zram only takes about 1/2 of the RAM that it provides.
> It's basically RAM compression.
> It works and makes a positive difference, even without exceedingly slow storage.

Right, but that begs a larger question: why swap *at all*? The whole point of virtual memory in the first place was as a performance hack to allow the processor to see a larger memory space than can be accommodated by core RAM alone. For certain workloads, in situations where one has a mass storage device upon which to place the swapped memory pages, this makes sense; but when the ‘storage device’ is the very core RAM that one is attempting to ‘extend’, it becomes a completely self-defeating exercise; complexity for the sake of complexity.

Cheers!


|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |              Chief Developer             |
|                           |              Paravel Systems             |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|   An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while he sweeps  |
|   on to the grand fallacy.                                           |
|                                           -- Benjamin Stolberg       |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/arm-dev/attachments/20181012/597c03dd/attachment.html>