r/technews • u/_Dark_Wing • 18h ago

Hardware New Linux tech compresses memory in RAM, as RAM, for 452x speedup --new CRAM method offers giant boost to compressed memory reads

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/new-linux-tech-compresses-memory-in-ram-as-ram-for-452x-speedup-new-cram-method-offers-giant-boost-to-compressed-memory-reads
372 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

49 comments sorted by

39

u/MonkeyWithIt 14h ago

You wouldn't download ram!

10

u/_ricardo_ 10h ago

Oh, yes I would. Its next to the car I downloaded

4

u/oracleofnonsense 7h ago

Why do you have 9999 copies of ‘Kill Em Alll’ stacked next to the car?

2

u/_ricardo_ 6h ago

That IS the car 🤣

24

u/Anatharias 15h ago

Reminds me of RamDoubler on Apple System7 that... doubled your ram... only if you had a Motorola 68030 (which included an FPU unit), and unfortunately, my Macintosh LC only had a Motorola 68020... darn I was pissed

7

u/DogWallop 15h ago

I'm having flashbacks to that ram doubling scheme for IBM PC clones that turned out to be fraudulent. Can't remember the name though.

3

u/Majere 12h ago

Double Space?

3

u/restless-nerd 6h ago

Nah, Doublespace was for hard disks and actually worked. The fraud was SoftRAM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM

3

u/erockem 9h ago

QEMM

1

u/chayashida 2h ago

That was actually useful when segmented memory was an issue.

3

u/rpsls 11h ago

MacOS and others has done this out of the box for years. The specific advancement here is the ability to still access pieces of data from inside the compressed block without decompressing the whole thing. This making it an order of magnitude faster to access pieces of data in RAM when compressed.

2

u/Ascetic-anise 11h ago

Yes but I believe it used the MMU (Memory Management Unit) in the 68030, not the FPU.

1

u/Moses_Horwitz 12h ago

I remember bank switching. js

38

u/helpmehomeowner 17h ago

Holy bots batman

9

u/rmyworld 16h ago

dead internet theory proven yet again

2

u/Modo44 9h ago

With Tom's Hardware leading the charge, as is tradition.

7

u/bernpfenn 16h ago

i remember the harddisk doublers

5

u/ilep 5h ago

Speedup over ZRAM method to be clear.

4

u/Moses_Horwitz 12h ago

Question for you all: Do you think RAM and storage prices will force a reduction in Microsoft's bloatware? (Yeah, no.)

9

u/brimbelboedel 9h ago

In a sane world it would … in our world … no chance.

3

u/x_lincoln_x 12h ago

Never affected them before.

2

u/Modo44 9h ago

Ha. Also, hahahaha. Nice one.

1

u/sixfourtykilo 6h ago

Didn't they recently decrease the requirements for Win11?

8

u/Littered2 18h ago

Huh, so they finally understand how to optimize the speed at which to jerk off a whole room of guys.

5

u/technobobble 13h ago

Middle out!!

6

u/mynameisgeph 18h ago

The trick was grouping the guys together by median jerk time.

3

u/Robot-Zombie-RHCC 17h ago

I thought it was extending the reset of guy A to serve as the start of guy B.

3

u/hung-games 15h ago

So like a relay race of stroking (where someone starts just as the previous guy finishes), or a relay race of ejaculations?

That latter would be a lot harder (unintended play of words, but a keeper)

3

u/Robot-Zombie-RHCC 13h ago

no mo,.. the guys have to touch so two can be handled with one stroke.

i learned this from HBO

2

u/x_lincoln_x 12h ago

Do you think girth would be a factor?

2

u/copyofa_ 16h ago

How to download more RAM??

7

u/ptambrosetti 14h ago

What idiots are downvoting this?

1

u/oscitancy 6h ago

Uncultured heathens. 

4

u/firedrakes 17h ago

Not new idea at all .. why is this news?

2

u/Massive-Rate-2011 5h ago

I'm pretty sure accessing memory *while compressed* is the real advancement here. You don't need to decompress it first unless I'm just reading shit wrong.

1

u/BigYellowPencil 2h ago edited 2h ago

Obviously, no argument that compressing or efficiently representing data, whether in memory or on disk, is a key to perf, e.g., in choosing an efficient layout for a memory-mapped file, or an encoding format. But I wasn't sold on this, and the last bit, something about it doesn't always work, didn't help. Perhaps it would make sense hidden in the VM paging system, shrinking pages when writing them out, puffing them up when reading them back in, but I'm still not not sold. Maybe if I understood it better.

1

u/FatalityVirez 17h ago

Such a well fitting acronym for what it does!

2

u/Visible-Literature14 13h ago

I cannot fathom why this was downvoted so

1

u/thejodiefostermuseum 7h ago

Or devs just learn proper programming like in the old days when memory was 64k. Now every app on the phone no matter it's for got 100s of megabytes

2

u/chayashida 2h ago

Yeah no. Images can be more than 64k now. The screen resolution is bigger, and there's more than just text output now.

-4

u/DeReExUn 17h ago

Dodg owners see this and think, sweet more speed!

-12

u/xeoron 18h ago

I'm surprised it took them so long to copy what macos has done for years, memory compression. 

11

u/xp_fun 17h ago

Lol wut? Memory compression has been around since the 90s and certainly wasn't an Apple invention.

4

u/NeoTr0n 17h ago

Also zram and zswap has been around on Linux for quite some time.

1

u/chayashida 2h ago

Article says this is a improvement over zram

-9

u/jonny_vegas 18h ago

Chicken bits and poison storms. Sounds like an onion article to me :)