SlackBuilds Repository

15.0 > System > swapinzram (1.0)

# swapinzram for Slackware
Modified swapinzram script by Didier Spaier  
http://slackware.uk/slint/x86_64/slint-15.0/source/swapinzram/


The package swapinzram is intended to extend the swap spaces available
beyond swap partitions and swap files, providing swap space in the form
of a block device in compressed RAM, using the zram kernel module. 
As the files in it are compressed this results in an increase of the 
RAM size usable by the system at the cost of a small overhead to 
compress and decompress the files. 

This can be useful to:
1. Avoid or at least delay swapping on a mass storage device when 
available space in RAM decreases. This results in a performance gain 
because writing in RAM is way faster that on a hard disk or even an SSD
2. Less writing on a storage devices like flash drives, eMMC, USB flash
drives or SD card, if the swap partition or file is installed on such 
devices.
Beyond the performance gain this also minimizes wearing of the device.

zram can also be used to create block devices in RAM for other usages,
like to store the files in /tmp or the kernel log, but this is not in
the scope of this package. However as we pick an available zram device
id there should be no conflict when adding these features. 

Also in the TODO list, allow to write idle/incompressible pages to a
backing storage rather than keeping them in memory. The documentation 
states that the backing storage should be a swap partition, not a swap
file, but I will check if it's still true.

Maintained by: marav
Keywords: zram,swap,ram
ChangeLog: swapinzram