Building Android ROMs on limited RAM: zRAM vs. zswap comparison

contact@merinorus.com (Antoine Merino) — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 17:39:30 +0000

Building an Android ROM is a memory-intensive task. The RAM requirements to build AOSP (Android Open Source Project) have kept growing for the last 15 years:

For Android 4, 8 GB of RAM is enough.
From Android 6, 16 GB of RAM is recommended.
From Android 10, 32 GB of RAM is recommended, although it could work with some disk swap.
From Android 13, 64 GB of RAM (really?!) is recommended.

I’ll show you how I still build ROMs within a reasonable amount of time with 16GB of RAM. Even less actually, since I’m compiling in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), which is basically a Linux virtual machine running on Windows.

Linux on Merinorus

Building Android ROMs on limited RAM: zRAM vs. zswap comparison