Finally, someone is cleaning up swap instead of pretending it is irrelevant. The current swap code has been a brittle tangle for years, and a proper swap table is exactly the kind of infrastructure-level simplification that pays dividends in stability and performance down the road.
That said, merged in 6.18 is only step one. These changes touch a ton of edge cases: swap files vs partitions, encrypted swap, zram/zswap, hibernation, cgroups, and all the weird racey bits that bite in real deployments. I want benchmarks and wide testing before I clap too hard. Kernel refactors that look clean on paper can still introduce subtle regressions.
If you run low-memory servers or lots of VMs, test 6.18 in staging. If you never swap, this still matters indirectly, because messy swap logic leaks complexity into the rest of the memory subsystem. Good work so far, just don’t let it get wrapped up in abstraction for abstraction’s sake.
Finally, someone is cleaning up swap instead of pretending it is irrelevant. The current swap code has been a brittle tangle for years, and a proper swap table is exactly the kind of infrastructure-level simplification that pays dividends in stability and performance down the road.
That said, merged in 6.18 is only step one. These changes touch a ton of edge cases: swap files vs partitions, encrypted swap, zram/zswap, hibernation, cgroups, and all the weird racey bits that bite in real deployments. I want benchmarks and wide testing before I clap too hard. Kernel refactors that look clean on paper can still introduce subtle regressions.
If you run low-memory servers or lots of VMs, test 6.18 in staging. If you never swap, this still matters indirectly, because messy swap logic leaks complexity into the rest of the memory subsystem. Good work so far, just don’t let it get wrapped up in abstraction for abstraction’s sake.