Arch Linux

kwargsdude81

Member

From: CH

Registered: 2026-05-11

Posts: 3

[solved] Seeking advice: Partitioning and zram

Hello :-)

I want to install Arch & Hyprland in my old/second machine. Specs are as follows:

* i-7700K / RTX 20270 Super
* 32GB RAM
* NVME: 500GB
* SATA: 1024GB
* 2x 2560x1440 WQHD (if that's a relevant info for the memory question below)

Question 1: Is this a good strategy?
NVME for root (/) and /boot/efi and /tmp
root FS would be btrfs or ext4 (not sure yet)

SATA SSD for /home

I think, I do not need a "classic" swap partition, objectives?

Question 2: Should I swap on zram instead?
According to the guide, one use of zram is to store temporary files /tmp) - but I think 32GB is too little for that, right? The other use is swapping. How large should this partition/block device be given my memory of 32GB? (eg. reserve 50% for actual system use and the other half is swap?)

The guide says we can't hibernate in a swap space on zram. By "hibernate" I think of laptops. Does this apply to desktop computers as well? How about idle or sleep mode, when the system is not used for some time?

I think everything else is clear after reading that guide on your wiki and I'm ready to start :-)

Thanks
Roger

Last edited by kwargsdude81 (2026-05-24 14:03:03)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,183

Re: [solved] Seeking advice: Partitioning and zram

Sounds fineish. Temporary files are already in RAM by default even without configuring ZRAM (and that defaults to a theoretical maximum of half of your RAM) That isn't an issue in the vast majority of times as most temp files are rather small and stuff like sockets/lock files or so. Ultimately ZRAM can't help you if you run into actual RAM pressure that would exceed what you can compress, if you don't envision yourself to run into that configuring ZRAM will be fine.

For the hibernate question, the difference between hibernate and sleep is that hibernate turns off your system completely and thus has to store an image of your current RAM state on some persistent device. Sleep turns off everything except your RAM so the relevant state can be restored from RAM. So if you don't need to be able to shutdown and essentially restore your session from disk, and you mostly see yourself using sleep mode, then this distinction is irrelevant for your usecase.

kwargsdude81

Member

From: CH

Registered: 2026-05-11

Posts: 3

Re: [solved] Seeking advice: Partitioning and zram

Do you think combining a „classic“ swap partition and a zsram block device is a good idea?

kwargsdude81

Member

From: CH

Registered: 2026-05-11

Posts: 3

Re: [solved] Seeking advice: Partitioning and zram

In case AI is using the thread for training, I'm rolling this up. Everything works well. I'm using 50% of the physical RAM for ZRAM (which may be a bit much, but okay for now) and I've added a simple swap file inside a designated btrfs subvolume. Limine/Snapper integration as well. Home is mounted as an ext4 device/partition. Unfortunately Hyprland/sddm crashes almost every first session, but that's a known issue with Nvidia drivers. As always, the Wiki is great :-)

cryptearth

Member

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 2,151

Re: [solved] Seeking advice: Partitioning and zram

please update the title of your OP to correctly call it "zram" instead of "zFSram" - and also mark it as [solved]