this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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Can someone explain how this works?
In a nutshell (eli5) swap is sorta "very slow ram" which is actually just a section of your hard drive /SSD/some other bizarre medium. It is generally used to temporarily store information that might be needed later but would waste valuable "fast ram" which is your actual ram sticks.
What's going on here is this user mounted Google drive in a way that the operating system can interact more directly with it, and it appears to have a set amount of space. Because we've mounted Google Drive we can tell our operating system to use it as swap....very very slow silly swap, but swap nonetheless.
So that's exactly what they did, they told the operating system to set aside X amount of Google Drive for swap, and when looking at the resource monitor we can see the "swap" appears as "more ram".
Hope that helps, please ask if I confused you :)
I'm pretty sure google drive just acts like a syncing tool in the same way as dropbox, so this would still act like a normal swap drive, presumably.
That said, I've only used swap partitions so I'm not sure how it works when you point it at a directory, but I guess it depends how this person set it up.
They've used google-drive-ocamlfuse to mount the drive in Linux, which if I recall correctly is direct access, rather than the way it works in Windows
No they didn't. They used rclone and mounted Google drive in vfs-cach mode which means it's firstly written to the drive before it's synced to the cloud
https://blog.horner.tj/how-to-kinda-download-more-ram/
My mistake, they chose a different implementation
So, if they did use a direct storage mode connection instead of this cache method with a Gbit+ Internet connection, do you think it would be faster than swap on an HDD?
I can't imagine a time when anyone would ever make a cloud swap drive. You want the swap to be as fast as possible
No. It also has to be written to GDrive's storage
It makes sense that you can do this, as it's how Chromebooks work, and they run on ~~Chrome OS~~ ~~Android~~ Linux
Oh cool