Backing device question about zram-init

[vaeth]

If I understand correctly, the backing device must currently be a partition; no filesystem, since the whole partition will be used. However, I never tried it myself.

The {write,idle} features are relatively new and not yet supported by zram-init. Maybe when I find time, I will prepare a new release with these features, but no promise yet.

[q3cpma]

But without those features, what's the difference with having a traditional swap with a lower priority? It's still compressed on disk and that's it?

[vaeth]

The main point of the backing device is that you don't get errors if the data cannot be compressed well so that you are actually running out of space. For a non-swap-disk you get in this case an obvious problem, probably read- or write-errors. I do not know how well swap can tackle such a situation; I would not rely on it on a real production system.

[vaeth]

v9.0 contains support for the new features