Pinebook Pro/Setting Up Zram

Table of content

ZRAM is essentially compressed memory. Your system uses some of it's CPU cycles to compress redundant data into a reserved area of your ram. Think of it as swap space, but without writing to your drive.

This is how to enable zram on ALARM/Manjaro ARM

Checking if ZRAM is supported

$ insmod | grep zram

Output: zram    ????? ?

If you get similar results, zram should be supported.

Setting up ZRAM

Load the zram module and create a 12GB zram device using lzo-rle for compression. 

sudo modprobe zram && sudo zramctl -a lzo-rle -s 12G zram0

Enabling swapping on the zram device 

sudo mkswap /dev/zram0 && sudo swapon /dev/zram0

Verify the 12GB of ZRAM is being used as swap 

free -h
 
total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:         3.7Gi       429Mi     2.7Gi        30Mi       562Mi
Swap:        11Gi          0B        11Gi
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