Hey everyone. First post. I have a very weird edge case here. I have a bunch of old laptops currently running Ubuntu. These systems have between 4 and 16 GB of RAM. I’m not actually using them as daily drivers, but instead as a render farm for Blender. The reason I use Ubuntu is I can allocate a certain portion of my hard drive as a swap file. This allows me to render scenes that go over the actual limit of memory on these devices. It’s not ideal, but it’s the only way to make use of what I have.
Now, as I understand it, Fedora does not support this. Instead, it uses a memory compression feature. The thing is, not only will this not allow enough memory to be freed to load some of my more complex 3D scenes, it will also waste precious CPU time doing the memory compression and I need as much CPU power as possible.
I’d really like to ditch Ubuntu as it just kind of sucks. They don’t offer up-to-date software, I hate the desktop, etc. However, I can’t convert these systems unless I can give my laptops an upsetting 16-32 GB of SWAP access! Can I disable the z-ram feature and use a legacy swapfile configuration? I’ve tried following the Fedora docs, but they’re for Fedora 14 and didn’t work for me.
Edit: Didn’t realize I can’t post videos with swearing, my bad.
Welcome to the community @triguy please take the video off or I have to flag you. It is not appropriate language we use in our community. You got agree with the COD please read it again.
For a fedora system that is already installed, to enable a swap partition simply
create an appropriate size partition and label it as linux swap
format the partition using ‘mkswap’
Activate it using ‘swapon’
If doing a new install then do the custom partitioning and create a swap partition while setting up for the install.
If you leave the zram alone you will have the benefit of the quick swap in memory and the physical swap will only be used when the need arises.
If you want to eliminate the zram and only swap to disk then the how-to info was provided above.