Meta Developing Compressed RAM "CRAM" For Linux: Better Than ZRAM & Zswap
Meta engineers have developed Compressed RAM, or CRAM, for Linux to address current memory shortages and high costs. This hardware-offloaded compression technology offers near-native DRAM performance, significantly outperforming existing solutions like ZRAM and Zswap. The work was presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague, with most supporting components already available in the mainline kernel.
- ▪Meta is developing CRAM to improve Linux memory capacity in response to hardware shortages and rising prices.
- ▪CRAM utilizes hardware-offloaded compression that allows for cacheline and byte access to compressed memory.
- ▪Read-only data access with CRAM achieves speeds comparable to raw DRAM performance.
- ▪Memory write operations using CRAM are much faster than those using ZRAM, Zswap, or plain swap.
- ▪Most of the individual components required for CRAM support are already included in the mainline Linux kernel.
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| Publication time | Tue, 06 Oct 2026 06:23:06 -0400 |
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Meta Developing Compressed RAM "CRAM" For Linux: Better Than ZRAM & Zswap Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 6 October 2026 at 06:23 AM EDT. Add A Comment With today's memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM "CRAM" for Linux. This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CRAM. Gregory Price of Meta presented yesterday at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague on Compressed RAM for Linux. Most of the individual pieces needed to support CRAM are already mainline.
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