New Linux tech compresses memory in RAM, as RAM, for 452x speedup

What happened

New Linux tech compresses memory in RAM, as RAM, for 452x speedup, according to Tom's Hardware. The new method allows access using standard memory semantics instead of as a block device, drastically improving performance. A new compression model, called CRAM, offers a different path to compression that avoids swap entirely by keeping the compressed data in memory, and it offers up to 452x the performance of ZRAM.

In Linux, the most popular options are zswap and ZRAM, but both of these options are fundamentally swap-layer features. CRAM is a new take that claims to boost performance tremendously.

The central realization that seems to have spurred the development of CRAM is that the largest portion of the performance hit from compressed memory isn't the compression; that's tiny. No, the largest hit apparently stems mostly from the fault itself and the swap behavior.