I don’t know shit about computers, is this going to translate to noticeable improvements for people who use Linux as their daily driver? Or is this more of a small improvement for the average user?
I use it on a mini PC running Alpine Linux used as a router. It significantly increases the performance of Blocky when it’s importing tens of thousands of hostnames to block.
I use it on SBCs like raspberry pi to not write swap to the microsd. If it gets faster I won’t complain but they literally only drive my 3d printer and host the web interface and gcode uploads so I probably won’t notice
A lot of distros enable ZRAM by default. Some don’t (such as Ubuntu apparently). If not, no effect
Otherwise, the worst case scenario is thousands of times improved latency, and improvements across the board
This means faster response time. For gamers, this might mean less stutters. For DJs it might mean the music doesn’t skip.
It’s hard to know what impact on which apps. It might be negligable, and memory constrained systems with fewer cpus are probably the biggest winners. But if the benchmarks don’t have regressions elsewhere, every system will benefit
In practice though, I’m seeing so many posts for kernel 7.4 with huge improvements, that it seems that kernel 7.4 will be overall noticeably faster for most it feels like
And whilst the FuckAI crowd would moan about it (and I’m not really a fan of AI), in reality, many of these optimisations were likely caught by AI making test harnesses and benchmarking sections of code, analysing the profiling data and identifying slow algorithms.
many of these optimisations were likely caught by AI making test harnesses and benchmarking sections of code, analysing the profiling data and identifying slow algorithms.
Do you have a particular reason to think that, or is it speculation? If the former, can you share some links?
Yeah… Absolutely. I have a few references:
- https://www.phoronix.com/news/Faster-Kernel-Builds-AI-v2 (this only affects building speed)
- We know its being HEAVILY used for everything: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-rc6-Released
- We know Linus is using it: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/818bebeb63dd6bf5f4e07e145f6cdbace520a34c
I also recall seeing another article, but admittedly unable to find it where AI isolated a kernel bug that reduced latency too (but maybe someone else had it). I thought it had something to do with file handling. Without that though, it could be speculation, and bad memory on my side.
That being said, we (unfortunately) use AI at work, and it is good at finding performance bottlenecks which even profiling won’t find. I’d be very surprised if no devs used it kernel side for the same reason
I have never used zram, so for me, no.
I don’t know if there are any distros that set it up out-of-box, and I’d guess that a lot of people won’t use it if it isn’t set up for them by default.
searches
This guy in a 2023 thread on Reddit says that Fedora has it enabled out-of-box.
searches
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/SwapOnZRAM
Fedora Workstation has included zram since July 2019 (Fedora 31) by default. Any clean installed systems from that point will automatically be upgraded to this feature.
Fedora IoT has included zram from the beginning. All systems will automatically get this feature upon upgrade.
That feature targeted Fedora 33. I’m not familiar with the Fedora changes wiki thing, so I don’t know whether it actually went into Fedora 33 or not.
It’s really aimed at systems that are running on a small amount of memory and are hitting swap. My systems don’t really hit swap. But if you are swapping, it generally lets you reduce the amount of swapping in exchange for some more CPU usage.
Pop os has it out of the box too
