On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 10:51:50AM +0100, Philip Hands wrote: > On Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:51:09 +0200, Michael Biebl <bi...@debian.org> wrote: > > I don't think symlinking /tmp to /run would be a good idea, as one could > > fill up > > /tmp (accidentaly) pretty quick. > > If we want to make / ro, then a separate tmpfs for /tmp looks like a better > > idea > > to me. > > While were about this, for installs where the users select multiple > partitions we currently create a separate /tmp partition. > > This strikes me as suboptimal, since one could use the disk space > allocated to /tmp as extra swap and then allocate a tmpfs of that size > to be mounted on /tmp with no effect other than allowing the system to > have access to more swap than it would have otherwise had (of course, > that's probably more than it needs, so instead you could just save some > disk space that would otherwise be left generally unused by overloading > the swap usage with /tmp usage. > > Therefore, in the multi-partition setup, I think we should also default > to having /tmp on tmpfs.
Sounds like a great idea. I'd extend it to any setups with a swap. Tmpfs is a lot faster than regular filesystems: it doesn't have to care about preserving the data's integrity after a crash and thus has no barriers, journaling, fsync(). When there's plenty of unused memory, the data will not ever touch the disk, too -- gracefully getting written out when there is a better use for memory it takes. Since most files in /tmp/ are very short lived, it's a good optimization. -- 1KB // Microsoft corollary to Hanlon's razor: // Never attribute to stupidity what can be // adequately explained by malice.
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