On Friday, June 5, 2020 12:12:40 PM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:07 PM John M. Harris Jr
<johnmh(a)splentity.com>
wrote:
>
>
> On Friday, June 5, 2020 11:48:14 AM MST Chris Murphy wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 6:43 AM Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro(a)gnome.org>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:52 am, Chris Murphy
> > > <lists(a)colorremedies.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > > That is the plan, otherwise the swap-on-zram device probably never
> > > > gets used. And then its overhead, which is small but not zero, is
> > > > just
> > > > a waste.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > I thought the plan was to get rid of the disk-based swap partition,
> > > since it has an unacceptable impact on system responsiveness?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Default new installations, yes. No disk-based swap partition.
> >
> >
> >
> > For upgrades, there's no mechanism to remove an existing
> > swap-on-drive. And the installer will still permit swap-on-drive being
> > added in custom partitioning. Both of these paths results in two swap
> > devices.
> >
> >
> >
> > We could ask Anaconda, if a custom installation creates swap-on-disk,
> > to remove /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf. And in that case, users
> > will not get swap-on-zram. And we could also forgo the change being
> > applied on upgrades.
>
>
>
> It may be best to respect the user's decision, and not add a zram device
> on upgraded systems. This would lead to less unexpected behavior. I'd
> support that, for sure :)
Contra argument: It also leads to fragmentation of the user base. Most
users use a distribution because they trust the decisions. And while
it is only a preference, not a policy the Workstation Product
Requirements Document says "Upgrading the system multiple times
through the upgrade process should give a result that is the same as
an original install of Fedora Workstation."
There is a balancing act here that should be considered because a
large percent of Fedora users upgrade rather than reprovision. It
might even be the majority case.
Well, that's for the GNOME stuff. This is a system-wide change proposal, is it
not? Additionally, you could still be meeting that requirement here, as a new
install with the same options selected, that is, to have a swap partition,
would disable the zram device. That'd be a nice middleground for users like
myself that don't have enough RAM to waste on a zram device. I'm writing this
email on a Lenovo ThinkPad X200 Tablet with 6 GiB of RAM, where giving half of
my RAM to zram would kill my system's performance, if not quickly cause OOM.
--
John M. Harris, Jr.