142
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
142 points (96.7% liked)
Linux
47996 readers
1007 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Some defaults I would like to see:
Have zsh as the interactive shell (And also have its dotfiles in a better location like XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zsh)
Btrfs with compression enabled and subvolumes set. (Maybe also timeshift installed, not sure because not everyone uses timeshift for btrfs snapshots).
ZRAM (With proper sysctl.conf like PopOS does).
Pacman as the package manager with an Aur helper already installed.
No bloat™ preinstalled, nothing of shipping flatpak or snap by default or even a DE. So I can just boot into a tty without having to do the minimal install from zero.
Comply with the FHS and XDG specs (Arch fucking installs packages to /opt and doesnt set ~/.local/bin as part of PATH)
Dont break userspace (arch did this recently with an update to glibc that removed a patch that breaks steam games)
Edit: Also forgot to mention:
And enable/automate maintenance services for BTRFS. For example:
balaceshould be run on heavily used system disks orscrubcould help detect errors even on single disks.Could you explain the preference of ZRAM over ZSWAP? I thought the latter was the more advanced and better performing solution. Is there some magic in Pop's config?
It is just that zram is much faster than zswap because it uses the ram to store compressed memory. Android already uses it by default.
These are worth reading:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/mzun99/new_zram_tuning_benchmarks/ https://linuxreviews.org/The_Benefits_Of_Having_A_Compressed_zram_Swap_Device_On_Linux
Thanks for the links! I updated my config from z3fold to zsmalloc and adjusted the vm.page-cluster to test these out.
Reading a bit more, I think when using large max_pool_percent (>30) with Zswap the two solutions are more similar than not. A crucial difference is what use-case is more acceptable since Zswap can cause unresponsiveness (and potential lockup) under high memory pressure. While Zram could result in an OOM crash in a similar worst-case scenario.
Oh I can tell you that zram will not result in an OOM that zswap would prevent:
I once ran into a bug when using foobar2000 with wine to convert my music library that resulted in an insanely high ram usage, like my 16 GIB ram was filled and then my 32 GIB zram was also filled and the PC froze.
I just went and edited my zram config to make my zram 48GIB and ran foobar again, it ended the conversion without issue kek. No idea wtf happened but whatever data was being written in memory was being compressed good by zRAM, like very few people would even use a swap partition or file that is more than 32 GIB to begin with.
I also tested running Zelda tears of the kingdom in yuzu using 4GiB of ram with a big zram and it worked, that game in yuzu is a ramhog and on windows people need 16 GiB of ram and they still max out their swapfile.
There is also a vid on yt titled zram vs windows pagefile where a user running endevour demostrates how zram can take a bunch of Minecraft mods while windows with the help its of pagefile cant
Edit: Here is the vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMYTBsjeoTc