HN.zip

Reminder: Enable ZRAM on your Linux system to optimize RAM usage

14 points by type0 - 2 comments
Kim_Bruning [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There's also kernel zswap, right?

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/mm/zswap....

Oh right, definitely. Chrisdown wrote an article comparing the two:

https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...

Zswap is supposed to degrade more gracefully.

There's even some HN comments on it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47500746

iberator [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I remember that back in around 2007 i was able to somehow mount a graphical card (ati similar to geforce2?) memory directly in Linux, and put my swap file there :); Great times. Slackware 8.1 i think.

as for zram: somehow i dislike it. Nowdays ram is plenty and if not: better to have fast OOM than chug of death with swap.

I also remember running NetBSD 1.3.1 and Slackware 3 on 386SZ 26MHZ with 2 mb of ram (nowadays hard limit is 4mb to boot due the large memory pages on x86 afik)