Linux 3.11's feature set now confirmed

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-for-Workgroups-Linux-3-11-s-feature-set-now-confirmed-1917712.html

by tellarin • 13 years ago

31 17 13 years ago

fooqux3• 13 years ago

Not sure about the new icon, but the name is winning.

mwexler• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x#Windows_for_Workgr... if you don't get the reference... Well played, Sir Linus.

CanSpice• 13 years ago

That website looks like it was designed right around Windows 3.11's release. Yikes.

nly2• 13 years ago

Compressed swap looks interesting

mikevm2• 13 years ago

Mac OS X Mavericks (the upcoming version) has it enabled by default.

gtaylor2• 13 years ago

The downvotes have already spoken to this to some extent, but who cares? My Macbook Pro is slow enough in general running OS X, and especially so when RAM gets tight. I'm not sure I'd want to add this additional overhead.

I see this more as an additional tool in the box than something appropriate for 100% of Linux users. You'll know when you need it, but most probably won't.

fooqux3• 13 years ago

I'm all for options, but isn't swap slow enough as it is already without adding additional overhead?

Even on tiny embedded devices, storage is cheaper than cycles IMO.

s_baby• 13 years ago

I think they're doing compressed swap to ramdisk.

nly2• 13 years ago

It's not the cost of the storage, it's how slow it to read and write to it. This is still going to be an order of magnitude faster than swapping to disk.

aaronbee• 13 years ago

The point is to avoid writing to disk entirely by compressing RAM that may otherwise be swapped to disk when remaining RAM is low.

See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/91969

bodyfour• 13 years ago

As others have pointed out, the point of zswap is to "swap" in and out of RAM.

I'd like to add that your premise is faulty anyway: since compressed objects are smaller doing I/O on them is faster. As long as cost of the I/O you saved is less than the cost of doing the compression, it's faster not slower. Transparently compressed I/O usually uses high-speed algorithms (LZ4, LZO, etc) to take advantage of this effect.

Also, when a machine is swapping you'll usually find that the CPU is near idle since useful work is blocked on the swap I/O. Spending a little CPU time to speed up that I/O is a win.

lvillani• 13 years ago

By the way, I recently discovered that you could use it in Ubuntu since 2012 (12.04).

Just `apt-get install zram-config` and reboot, voilá.

I'm using it both on my laptop and desktop at work with 4Gb physical RAM. I have PyCharm and lots of tabs open in Chrome and it has to reach around ~2gb of compressed swap before it hits the disk. It doesn't even seem to slow down the machine in any noticeable way.

A truly nice, little hidden gem.

melchebo• 13 years ago

It looks like it works right after install. No need to reboot. On an up to date Ubuntu 12.04.2 that is.

Linux 3.11's feature set now confirmed

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