aboutsummaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/drivers/staging/zram/zram.txt
AgeCommit message (Collapse)AuthorFilesLines
2014-01-30zram: promote zram from stagingMinchan Kim1-77/+0
Zram has lived in staging for a LONG LONG time and have been fixed/improved by many contributors so code is clean and stable now. Of course, there are lots of product using zram in real practice. The major TV companys have used zram as swap since two years ago and recently our production team released android smart phone with zram which is used as swap, too and recently Android Kitkat start to use zram for small memory smart phone. And there was a report Google released their ChromeOS with zram, too and cyanogenmod have been used zram long time ago. And I heard some disto have used zram block device for tmpfs. In addition, I saw many report from many other peoples. For example, Lubuntu start to use it. The benefit of zram is very clear. With my experience, one of the benefit was to remove jitter of video application with backgroud memory pressure. It would be effect of efficient memory usage by compression but more issue is whether swap is there or not in the system. Recent mobile platforms have used JAVA so there are many anonymous pages. But embedded system normally are reluctant to use eMMC or SDCard as swap because there is wear-leveling and latency issues so if we do not use swap, it means we can't reclaim anoymous pages and at last, we could encounter OOM kill. :( Although we have real storage as swap, it was a problem, too. Because it sometime ends up making system very unresponsible caused by slow swap storage performance. Quote from Luigi on Google "Since Chrome OS was mentioned: the main reason why we don't use swap to a disk (rotating or SSD) is because it doesn't degrade gracefully and leads to a bad interactive experience. Generally we prefer to manage RAM at a higher level, by transparently killing and restarting processes. But we noticed that zram is fast enough to be competitive with the latter, and it lets us make more efficient use of the available RAM. " and he announced. http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg57717.html Other uses case is to use zram for block device. Zram is block device so anyone can format the block device and mount on it so some guys on the internet start zram as /var/tmp. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-838198-start-0.html Let's promote zram and enhance/maintain it instead of removing. Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com> Acked-by: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org> Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org> Cc: Bob Liu <bob.liu@oracle.com> Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> Cc: Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@google.com> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Seth Jennings <sjenning@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2013-02-03zram: force disksize setting before using zramMinchan Kim1-12/+13
Now zram document syas "set disksize is optional" but partly it's wrong. When you try to use zram firstly after booting, you must set disksize, otherwise zram can't work because zram gendisk's size is 0. But once you do it, you can use zram freely after reset because reset doesn't reset to zero paradoxically. So in this time, disksize setting is optional.:( It's inconsitent for user behavior and not straightforward. This patch forces always setting disksize firstly before using zram. Yes. It changes current behavior so someone could complain when he upgrades zram. Apparently it could be a problem if zram is mainline but it still lives in staging so behavior could be changed for right way to go. Let them excuse. Acked-by: Jerome Marchand <jmarchand@redhat.com> Acked-by: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org> Acked-by: Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com> Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2010-08-31Staging: zram: Update zram documentationNitin Gupta1-22/+36
Update zram documentation to reflect transition form ioctl to sysfs interface. Signed-off-by: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
2010-06-18Staging: zram: Rename ramzswap to zram in documentationNitin Gupta1-20/+31
Related changes: - Included example to show usage as generic (non-swap) disk with ext4 filesystem. - Renamed rzscontrol to zramconfig to match with new device naming. Signed-off-by: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org> Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
2010-06-18Staging: Rename ramzswap files to zramNitin Gupta1-0/+51
Related changes: - Modify revelant Kconfig and Makefile accordingly. - Change include filenames in code. - Remove dependency on CONFIG_SWAP in Kconfig as zram usage is no longer limited to swap disks. Signed-off-by: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org> Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>