Why does OM create zram

[richp (rich)]

Hi all,
I have tried rock, rollong and cooker all with plasma x-11.
I have an old ideapad with an i7-4710mq intergrated graphics and nvidia geforce 840m gpu.
For each install i used manual partitioning to preserve my linuxmint installation and leave empty space for adding other os for testing.
Why does Om create zram and what is it used for?
I have a 16GB swap partition but after booting into to any of the live isos it is not enabled but there is 5.8GB zram mounted as swap, is this normal behavior as i have never seen this in other distros.

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0    7:0    0   2.8G  1 loop /run/initramfs/image
sda      8:0    0 953.9G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0    16G  0 part 
├─sda2   8:2    0   600G  0 part 
├─sda3   8:3    0     1G  0 part 
├─sda4   8:4    0    50G  0 part 
├─sda5   8:5    0    40G  0 part 
└─sda6   8:6    0    60G  0 part 
sdb      8:16   1     0B  0 disk 
sdc      8:32   1  14.5G  0 disk /run/initramfs/omdv
├─sdc1   8:33   1     3G  0 part 
└─sdc2   8:34   1   6.4M  0 part 
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  
zram0  253:0    0   5.8G  0 disk [SWAP]

this is an lsblk after booting into the rome live iso, sda1 is my swap partion

I wanted just a traditional swap partition so I enabled swap and disabled the zram using systemctl stop dev-zram0.swap before reinstallation, on reboot my swap partion is now mounted as expected but so is zram.
If i understand correctly zram uses gpu ram, could this be the source of the nvidia gpu problems
at least the problems i am experiencing (sddm loging me out after a couple of minutes before the proprietary drivers were installed and issues with suspend/resume.
To be clear disabling zram and removing related packages doesn’t solve these problems but could there be some configuration creared during install that prevents things from working correctly afterwards?

[WilsonPhillips]

You can uninstall zram-generator and that should get rid of it.

@richp during the install, did you tell it to swap to file?

[2disbetter (Rocking Rock 5.0 on a Framework 13 (12th Gen Intel & 13th Gen Intel)))]

But do we know why Zram is being created to begin with? I have it on my Rock installs as well.

[LeeTalbert]

It looks like OpenMandriva has opted for zram, basically a temp file type thing, rather than a dedicated partition.
I don’t know enough about calamares, but I’m sure it could be configured to disable zram if the user makes a swap partition.

[WilsonPhillips]

That’s why I was curious if he selected swap to file.

[richp (rich)]

Iv’e just installed rome again, this time not only disabling zram but also removing zram-generator before starting the installer. After booting into the new system zram is still there. Is there a way to install without creating zram?

[WilsonPhillips]

Well, this is above my pay grade.

[richp (rich)]

no i just enabled swap before starting the installer so that calamares would add it to the fstab. I dont even know how to select swap to file i didnt see an option for that.

[richp (rich)]

I noticed somethng else strange. On the installs i have done where i enabled my swap partition and disabled vram the plasma shell crashes shortly after the actual install begins, this dosent affect the install its self but it didn’t happen before i started messing with swap and vram. On the last install i checked lsblk after the crash and my swap partition was no longer mounted. I dont know if this info is relevant or not. The install is so quick im happy to try any suggestions.

[P_J]

@richp You may want to check out this OMLx how-to on Zram. It includes a portion on how to uninstall it.

[Post-installation][How-to] Improve performance and stability with zRAM

What is zRAM and why this how-to (in few words)? The goal of this how-to is to provide an almost out-of-the-box setup, with no file modification, few commands and easily revertible. This page is not dedicated to full zRAM coverage and tuning, there are some other resources linked at the bottom of this topic. By default zRAM is not activated in OpenMandriva Lx, but it has some benefits to use it. zRAM allows to compress the RAM. Since the compression/decompression of RAM takes less time than t…

this how-to probably needs to be scrubbed or updated since zram is by default.

Personally, I like zram and was uber glad when I saw it was already set up… but unhappy because I had already set it up manually… and had a couple zrams!

[richp (rich)]

I had seen this but i think its out of date because none of those services were enabled and zram-init wasnt installed instead i had to use
systemctl stop dev-zram0.swap
and uninstall zram-generator
but what i want to do is install rome without creating the zram in the first place if that is possible.

[WilsonPhillips]

I asked for a swap file and I only see one. I do see a swap partition, but I believe that is built into the BTRFS subvolumes.

┌──[wilson@heisenberg] Thu Jan 23, 08:41:19 [~] 
└──[ <$> /bin/lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda           8:0    0   3.7T  0 disk 
└─sda1        8:1    0   3.7T  0 part /4TB-SSD1
sdb           8:16   0   3.7T  0 disk 
└─sdb1        8:17   0   3.7T  0 part /4TB-SSD2
sdc           8:32   0   3.6T  0 disk 
└─sdc1        8:33   0   3.6T  0 part /4TB-HDD
zram0       253:0    0     8G  0 disk [SWAP]
nvme1n1     259:0    0 953.9G  0 disk 
└─nvme1n1p1 259:1    0 953.9G  0 part /backup2
nvme0n1     259:2    0 953.9G  0 disk 
└─nvme0n1p1 259:3    0 953.9G  0 part /backup1
nvme2n1     259:4    0 931.5G  0 disk 
├─nvme2n1p1 259:5    0   300M  0 part /boot/efi
└─nvme2n1p2 259:6    0 931.2G  0 part /home
                                      /var/cache
                                      /var/log
                                      /boot
                                      /swap
                                      /

[richp (rich)]

Just checked my fstab and swap is not mentioned

# <file system>             <mount point>  <type>  <options>  <dump>  <pass>
UUID=7AD8-343D  /boot/efi       vfat    umask=0077      0       1
UUID=7426beca-d71a-462b-9333-de262a770227 /data          ext4    defaults,noatime,discard 0 2
UUID=1b33e4c4-a2bf-4cfd-9ac1-567ffc5ae555 /              ext4    defaults,noatime,discard 0 1
tmpfs                                     /tmp           tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

so if swap isn’t being enabled by the fstab what is?

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0 953.9G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0    16G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sda2   8:2    0   600G  0 part /data
├─sda3   8:3    0     1G  0 part 
├─sda4   8:4    0    50G  0 part 
├─sda5   8:5    0    40G  0 part 
├─sda6   8:6    0    60G  0 part 
├─sda7   8:7    0    80G  0 part /
├─sda8   8:8    0     1G  0 part /boot/efi
└─sda9   8:9    0    80G  0 part 
sdb      8:16   1     0B  0 disk 
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  

Just to be sure this is the result of lsblk and

[rich@Z710-OMrome ~]$ sudo swapon -s
Filename                                Type            Size            Used            Priority
/dev/sda1                               partition       16777212        0               -2
[rich@Z710-OMrome ~]$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.

I checked the fstab because i thought maybe i needed to change the priority but obiously i cant do it there.

[WilsonPhillips]

When you do a swapon to enable the swap, it should put the partition in fstab for you.

[richp (rich)]

It was alreay enabled i used the command to to see the priority i dont understand why its -2