Laptop Swap Panic Traced to Zswap Misreadings and a Silent Compressor Fallback
A developer's 7.5 GiB Ubuntu laptop appeared to be drowning in five gigabytes of swap, which seemed to demand a fix. Kernel counters showed that most of that swap was a compressed RAM cache, with very few pages ever written to the budget SSD. The investigation also revealed that zswap was silently running LZO instead of the LZ4 requested on the kernel command line, because LZ4 was a loadable module not yet available at boot. The fix involves loading the LZ4 module and setting the compressor at runtime, with a persistent setting for future boots. The author argues that measuring before tuning avoided an unnecessary change and uncovered the real configuration problem.
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