How do I enable Desktop to Raspberry Pi 4 2GB

So, how does zswap fit into the picture? Zswap is primarily a compression utility. When a process is ready to be relocated to the swap file, zswap compresses it and determines if the new, smaller size has to be moved or whether it may stay in RAM. Decompressing a 'zswapped' page is significantly faster than accessing the swap file, therefore this is an excellent method to get more bang for your buck from computers with limited RAM.

You can activate zswap with a single command because it is supported by default.

In your terminal, type the following:

$ sudo sed -i -e 's/$/ zswap.enabled=1/' /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt

This command is essentially a shortcut to modify the cmdline.txt file in your boot folder and set the zswap.enabled option to 'True' for newer Linux users (1).

After that, you may restart your device to reap the benefits of improved performance!

You can stop there if you're not a confident Linux user. On your existing 4GB or 8GB Raspberry Pi, the above should already increase performance. However, with a 2GB smartphone, this will not provide the smoothest performance.

Dave Jones, who oversees Canonical's Ubuntu Raspberry Pi effort, has a few more changes to share with experienced users. On his own blog, he wrote a more extensive piece about how he set things up, but we'll summarise it here.

Changing to z3fold and lz4 compression

The following are two further enhancements we'd want to make:

  • Using an allocator named z3fold to enhance the amount of items compressed.
  • To utilise the lz4 compression algorithm, which offers a better combination of speed and compression.

In your terminal, type the following command:

$ sudo -i

 This will prompt you for your password and boot you into root mode, where you may run the commands listed below:

# echo lz4 >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
# echo z3fold >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
# update-initramfs -u

 This adds the lz4 and z3fold modules to your initramfs, allowing them to be accessible at startup. Wait for the update-initramfs operation to finish before typing:

# exit

 To go back to your default user mode.

Finally, identical to previously, we must add the following commands to your cmdline.txt file:

$ sudo sed -i -e 's/$/ zswap.compressor=lz4/' /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt
$ sudo sed -i -e 's/$/ zswap.zpool=z3fold/' /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt

 Then restart your computer (you can just type reboot in the terminal).

You may double-check that the modifications were done appropriately by using grep to look for the parameters:

$ grep -R . /sys/module/zswap/parameters

 If everything is set up correctly, the output should look like this:

/sys/module/zswap/parameters/same_filled_pages_enabled:Y
/sys/module/zswap/parameters/enabled:Y
/sys/module/zswap/parameters/max_pool_percent:20
/sys/module/zswap/parameters/compressor:lz4
/sys/module/zswap/parameters/zpool:z3fold
/sys/module/zswap/parameters/accept_threshold_percent:90 

Ubuntu Desktop on the Raspberry Pi gets a performance bump!

How do I enable Desktop to Raspberry Pi 4 2GB

Don't worry if the above instruction sounded a little difficult. These optimizations will be implemented by default for all Raspberry Pi 4 devices, including the 400, when Ubuntu 22.04 is released in April.

If you do make these modifications and test them out on a 2GB Raspberry Pi 4, we'd love to know how much better your performance has become. Please let us know if you think it provides a good Ubuntu Desktop experience for users with 2GB of RAM.

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