zram-generator

Systemd unit generator for zram devices

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What it is

Systemd unit generator for zram devices

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Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.

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Mentions over time

HN mentions by year2 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-04-03 19:35:31 UTC to 2023-11-09 00:37:12 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

2 sources

ac29·Nov 9, 2023

No, but should you want to enable it, you can install systemd-zram-generator. See also: https://github.com/systemd/zram-generator As someone else mentioned, for many cases this will be a performance increase, not decrease. Compressing infrequently used memory frees up more memory to be used for filesystem caching among other things.

In 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

cmurf·Apr 3, 2020

Ext3, ext4, and XFS have a journal that's constantly being overwritten. On Btrfs, the file system is the journal. It does have a bit of a wandering trees problem [1], where F2FS expressly intends to reduce the wandering tree problem.[2] There's also different approaches that don't involve filesystems [3]. But I think you have to assess the crash resistance and repairability of filesystems, not just worry about write amplification. I think there's too much made about SSD wear. The exception are the consumer class of SD Card and USB flash, those are junk to depend on for persistent usage, best suited for occasional use, and all eventually fail. If you're using such flash, e.g. in an embedded device, you probably want to go with industrial quality flash to substantially improve reliability. Consider putting swap on zram [4] or using zswap [5

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]. I've used both, typically with a small pool less than 1/2 of RAM. I have no metric for clearly deciding a winner, either is an improvement over conventional swap. Perhaps hypothetically zswap should be better because it's explicitly designed for this use case; where zram is a compressed RAM disk on which you could put anything, including swap. But in practice, I can't tell a difference performance wise. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08514 [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/520829/ [3] https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast13/technical-sessions/... [4] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/blockdev/zram.txt https://github.com/systemd/zram-generator [5] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt

In Ask HN: Which Linux filesystem “produce” less wear and tear on SSD NAND?