The fourth iteration of Virtual Swap Space patches for the Linux kernel has been posted by Nhat Pham. The design introduces a virtualization layer that decouples swap entries from their physical backing storage, allowing dynamic allocation of virtual swap slots. This abstraction enables backends like zswap, zero-filled pages, swapfile slots, or in-memory pages to be associated with a virtual slot. Performance overhead is less than current swap at 0–40% usage, and only sub-1% higher at heavier usage. The design also paves the way for future improvements including multi-tier swapping, swapfile compaction, and Zswap writeback optimization.
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