Configuring Swap on ZRAM

In Fedora 33 some editions enabled swap on ZRAM by default. Fedora CoreOS currently has the zram-generator included but no configuration in place to enable swap on ZRAM by default. In order to configure swap on ZRAM you can lay down a configuration file via Ignition that will tell the zram generator to set up swap on top of a zram device.

The documentation for the config file format lives in the upstream documentation along with a comprehensive example. The most basic form of a configuration file that will set up a zram0 device for swap is:

variant: fcos
version: 1.3.0
passwd:
  users:
    - name: core
      ssh_authorized_keys:
        - $pubkey
storage:
  files:
    - path: /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf
      mode: 0644
      contents:
        inline: |
          # This config file enables a /dev/zram0 device with the default settings
          [zram0]

Once booted, you can verify the swap device is set up by viewing the swapon --show output. You can also view the true compression ratio of the currently configured zram devices by running zramctl.