OpenIoT & ELC 2016

Ever since Linux started running on embedded devices, having a swap for such had been considered a misconfiguration rather than a method for overcoming RAM shortage or performance booster. This attitude started to change with the spread of Android devices which usually don’t have a problem utilizing virtually any amount of memory. And with the introduction of ZRAM the usage of a compressed swap in RAM became more useful and more popular. This talk will give a comprehensive description of ZRAM and its counterpart, zswap, a summary of pro’s and con’s of both, present some new ideas on how to
combine these approaches for the good, and give measurement results for these, obtained on various devices, ranging from set top boxes to laptops, not to forget Android phones.