Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by CoolGuySteve 73 days ago
No because as far as we know 26.04 won't enable zswap or zram whereas Windows and MacOS both have memory compression technology of some sort. So Ubuntu will use significantly more memory for most tasks when facing memory pressure.

Apparently it's still in discussion but it's April now so seems unlikely.

Kind of weird how controversial it is considering DOS had QEMM386 way back in 1987.
3 comments
cogman10 73 days ago
Zswap is a no brainer. I have to wonder why the hesitancy.
link
functional_dev 72 days ago
interesting, I never realized macOS compresses memory in place before swapping.. Linux just dumps straight to disk, no wonder it freezes

Found good visual explainer on this - https://vectree.io/c/linux-virtual-memory-swap-oom-killer-vs...

link
bzzzt 73 days ago
QEMM386 for DOS did not have a memory compression feature. Only one of the later versions for Windows 3.1 did.
link
roryirvine 73 days ago
CPUs really weren't up to the job in the pre-Pentium/PowerPC world. Back then, zip files used to take an appreciable number of seconds to decompress, and there was a market for JPEG viewers written in hand-optimised assembly.

That's why SoftRAM gained infamy - they discovered during testing that swapping was so much faster than compression that the released version simply doubled the Windows swap file size and didn't actually compress RAM at all, despite their claims (and they ended up being sued into oblivion as a result...)

Over on the Mac, RAMDoubler really did do compression but it a) ran like treacle on the 030, b) needed to do a bunch of kernel hacks, so had compatibility issues with the sort of "clever" software that actually required most RAM, and c) PowerMac users tended to have enough RAM anyway.

Disk compression programs were a bit more successful - DiskDoubler, Stacker, DoubleSpace et al. ISTR that Microsoft managed to infringe on Stacker's patents (or maybe even the copyright?) in MS DOS 6.2, and had to hastily release DOS 6.22 with a re-written version free of charge as a result. These were a bit more successful because they coincided with a general reduction in HDD latency that was going on at roughly the same time.

link