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)
I've heard ZRAM mentioned before and I've just spent 5 minutes reading articles on it... Which is about the maximum I have time for these days when it comes to esoteric linux internals.
What's the downside? Does it use much CPU?
If I have enough RAM already, should I still enable it?
One article says it can be mapped to /tmp to reduce i/o. Is that a good idea?
This article is light on all of these kind of details.
What's old is new again: I remember various hacks like this being popular in early android ROMs because the first android phones really didn't have enough RAM to support the OS well.
Well, you stopped hearing about it, not because it stopped being used, but because its support became mainstream for a very long time. Google strongly recommends using zram on all devices, even on devices with a lot of RAM since like Android 10?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 23.6 ms ] threadas 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)
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
What's the downside? Does it use much CPU?
If I have enough RAM already, should I still enable it?
One article says it can be mapped to /tmp to reduce i/o. Is that a good idea?
This article is light on all of these kind of details.
If you do, you'll want zswap instead.