On 05/28/2010 11:10 PM, Dan Magenheimer wrote: > [PATCH V2 0/4] Frontswap (was Transcendent Memory): overview > > Changes since V1: > - Rebased to 2.6.34 (no functional changes) > - Convert to sane types (per Al Viro comment in cleancache thread) > - Define some raw constants (Konrad Wilk) > - Performance analysis shows significant advantage for frontswap's > synchronous page-at-a-time design (vs batched asynchronous speculated > as an alternative design). See http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/5/20/314 > I think zram (http://lwn.net/Articles/388889/) is a more generic solution and can also achieve swap-to-hypervisor as a special case. zram is a generic in-memory compressed block device. To get frontswap functionality, such a device (/dev/zram0) can be exposed to a VM as a 'raw disk'. Such a disk can be used for _any_ purpose by the guest, including use as a swap disk. This method even works for Windows guests. Please see: http://www.vflare.org/2010/05/compressed-ram-disk-for-windows-virtual.html Here /dev/zram0 of size 2GB was created and exposed to Windows VM as a 'raw disk' (using VirtualBox). This disk was detected in the guest and NTFS filesystem was created on it (Windows cannot swap directly to a partition; it always uses swap file(s)). Then Windows was configured to swap over a file in this drive. Obviously, the same can be done with Linux guests. Thus, zram is useful in both native and virtualized environments with different use cases. Thanks, Nitin -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>