Slax author's Blog (RSS)

Double RAM with zram

Slax will use zram technology. In my tests, I was able to run fully bloated KDE on a computer with only 256MB of RAM.

What zram does? It provides virtual block device in memory, which is compressed. If Linux is set up to use that compressed block of memory as swap, it can put there all currently unused blocks of memory (effectively compressing them).

It is a bit slower indeed, but the value added is enormous, since that way huge applications (like KDE) can run on computers where it would not run at all without zram. If I trim down KDE as I plan to do, it may be possible to run it on 128MB systems, that is actually my goal; not sure if it is possible, but will try.

Current system requirements for Slax pre-alpha test are:

Slax 32bit ... minimum 40MB of RAM required
Slax 64bit ... minimum 52MB of RAM required

If you wish to test zram on your computer, modprobe 'zram' module first, then echo some value like 50000000 to /sys/block/zram0/disksize, and finally mkswap and swapon the device /dev/zram0.

Thanks to Quax (Manfred Mueller) for this suggestion.

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