Comment 4 for bug 1654777

That still talks about on-disk swap. This doesn't create a swap file or swap partition; it creates a swap area in RAM. In general, there is no reason to have any sort of swap area on disk, save for scientific applications where you have 100 times as much working set as you have physical RAM.

In the context of the debian installer, I don't think you should rely on on-disk swap in any case. Creating a 1-2GB swap file when you have, e.g., 64MB of RAM is patently ridiculous: if you need that much more of a working set, you're never going to finish installation; you're just going to swap thrash for 2 or 3 years while the system tries to figure out how to operate the installer but is too busy operating kswapd.

The argument that having a swap file available makes RAM scheduling more-efficient is also one of rapidly-diminishing returns as RAM size grows: the entire installed system is like 4GB, the installer doesn't eat much memory, and most block cache won't get reused, so the system will likely stale out things at maximum efficiency even with 1GB of RAM.

zswap still requires a backing device (swap file or partition). zram doesn't. That should be brought up in the next discussion on the topic methinks.

In any case, there's already a zram-config package, and this script is a replacement for the one in the current release. Whether or not the installer switches to this or we install this by default or whatever is a secondary thought, but a consideration I wanted to raise. The longer discussions on that are probably off-topic in this particular bug.