Hi Roger! Thanks for answering in such detail. I'll try to comment on a few points.
Am 15.06.2011 22:46, schrieb Roger Leigh: > On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 05:33:59PM +0100, Roger Leigh wrote: > > The FHS defines the persistence/lifetime for /tmp and /var/tmp. > It does not make any recommendations about size. Yep, that's also how I read and understand the FHS. > Historical practice is that /tmp is small, and /var/tmp is > rather larger. When using Sun/Solaris systems back around 2000, > /tmp was always a tmpfs (it's the default), and /var/tmp was > disc. Solaris tmpfs didn't have size limits (filling it would > hang the system--I remember an undergrad being told off for > trying to download a RedHat ISO image to /tmp and killing the > system). On these systems files in /tmp were cleaned hourly, > and files in /var/tmp weekly. Files needing longer-term storage > went in /var/preserve (cleaned every few months) or on other > storage. As a fun fact, I made the opposite experience. At university (where $HOME was shared via NFS and had rather strict quotas) students where told to use /tmp for larger downloads. But then, this was not on a Solaris system. > In the IRC discussion, it was mentioned that some DVD authoring > applications were using /tmp to create/store 4GiB disc images. > Also, backup software used /tmp to store multi-gigabyte backups > during its operation. I would argue that any application expecting > to be able to store such large files in /tmp has wholly unrealistic > expectations. If I look at todays installers for Linux distros, like openSUSE, Redhat, Ubuntu or Debian, the default option creates a large /tmp, as it is a subdirectory of /. I don't know of any Linux distribution which uses tmpfs for /tmp. /tmp on a separate partition is an option which not all installers offer and needs to be chosen explicitly. So while we don't guarantee any minimum sizes for /tmp, applications expecting a large /tmp is not completely unrealistic. I acknowledge that my concern is more targetted at a typical desktop/laptop user, which certainly has different usage of software than a server installation. > Initial setup: > I would like to see the Debian installer support setup of /tmp to > permit > - disabling of /tmp on tmpfs > - setting of a tmpfs size other than 20% core > - allocation of sufficient backing store (swap) during partitioning > If we wanted to guarantee a minimum tmpfs size here, we could ensure > that there's sufficient swap to up the limit from 20% to something > more, or an absolute value rather than a percentage. Having RAMTMP=no and letting d-i enable it if it finds a minimum amount of ram would be a good compromise imho. Michael -- Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the universe are pointed away from Earth?
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