This project creates RAM based block device (named ramzswap) which acts as swap disk. Pages swapped to this disk are compressed and stored in memory itself.

Compressing pages and keeping them in RAM virtually increases its capacity. This allows more applications to fit in given amount of memory. This is especially useful for:

• Embedded Devices: Memory is scarce and adding more memory increases device cost. Also, flash storage suffers from wear-leveling issues, so its useful if we can avoid using them as swap device.

• Small Desktops (aka Virtual Machines!): De/Compression is much faster than swapping to disks (include seek times!). Of course, you also get to run VMs with much less RAM assigned. Total memory savings from individual VMs can be quite significant if multiple VMs are hosted.

• LiveCDs : These typically do not have any disk swap configured.

Mailing Lists

linux-mm-cc at laptop.org (Info Page)

Help

CompilingAndUsing

News

• Apr 28, 08 - Todo list is here
• Mar 17, 08 - compcache-0.3 Released with more bug fixes!
• Mar 03, 08 - compcache-0.2 Released! Now it also exports statistics through /proc.
• Feb 20, 08 - compcache-0.1 Released!
• Feb 14, 08 - TLSFAllocator - Performance evaluation of TLSF allocator.
• Jan 24, 08 - SwapReplayDesign - Design and usage information. Work on allocator continues.
• Jan 09, 08 - SwapReplay sub-project now functional! Will post some documentation soon.
• Dec 21, 07 - Now compcache can dynamically resize - pages are allocated on demand and freed when not required. For now, compression structure is not yet implemented i.e. compressed page still requires 1 page for storage. Compression structure (heart of this project!) is currently under design.