Fedora 29 For ARM Eyeing ZRAM Support, ARMv7 UEFI Booting

When it comes to the growing number of changes slated for Fedora 29, while most of the feature plans benefit all supported CPU architectures, there are also some ARM-specific improvements planned.

There are two main ARM feature proposals so far for Fedora 29: enabling ZRAM for ARMv7/AArch64 and using UEFI for ARMv7 device booting.

The ZRAM plans are about using ZRAM for SWAP on ARMv7/ARMv8 to improve the performance and reliability, particularly for ARM boards with limited amounts of RAM. ZRAM (formerly compcache) supports dynamically creating a compressed block device within RAM which would be used as the SWAP. Using ZRAM on these ARM boards that often have relatively small amounts of physical RAM, should yield more efficient memory use and thus a better overall experience. The ARM ZRAM plans for Fedora 29 are outlined here.

The other ARM F29 proposal to point out at this point is UEFI for ARM. Right now Fedora on 32-bit ARMv7 uses extlinux for booting the kernel, but thanks to ongoing UEFI support improvements and for U-Boot, they have decided it's time to support it for ARMv7. Fedora already makes use of UEFI on AArch64 for booting while now they believe it's in good enough shape for moving it over on ARMv7.