Issue
Does anyone know what is the difference between feature ZRAM and ZSWAP in linux kernel? Seems they are very similar-- store compressed pages in ram.
Solution
ZRAM is a module of the Linux kernel, previously called "compcache". ZRAM increases performance by avoiding paging on disk and instead uses a compressed block device in RAM in which paging takes place until it is necessary to use the swap space on the hard disk drive. Since using RAM is faster than using disks, zram allows Linux to make more use of RAM when swapping/paging is required, especially on older computers with less RAM installed.
ZSWAP is a lightweight compressed cache for swap pages. It takes pages that are in the process of being swapped out and attempts to compress them into a dynamically allocated RAM-based memory pool. zswap basically trades CPU cycles for potentially reduced swap I/O. This trade-off can also result in a significant performance improvement if reads from the compressed cache are faster than reads from a swap device.
Answered By - Gopal Singh Dagur Answer Checked By - Katrina (WPSolving Volunteer)