On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 8:28 PM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: [snip]
> I had no idea it was doing this either until your post. I got the same > questions as you do. Why is it there? tmpfs is frequently used in places where data doesn't need to persist across reboots. /var/run meets this description, because it usually contains files that have PID numbers for running daemons. (i.e. an init script spawns acpid, saves the PID of that instance into a file under /var/run, and consults that file on future runs to see if the daemon it's responsible for is running). It also appears to be where udev keeps its current understanding of the running host machine. > Why so much is allocated to it? It's not, really. That's a *maximum* theoretical size, which is only reached if files are placed there. >From here, I'm currently booted into the Gentoo LiveDVD (2012.1). /run is mounted tmpfs, and contains 668K of files. > Where can we change the settings for this questionable "feature"? It's not so bad. Really. > > I'm hoping someone will come along and answer both our questions. I'm > really hoping for a place we can change the settings. I don't mind it > being there so much if it is useful. I would like to know its purpose > tho. A pretty straightforward read: http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt Incidentally, with tmpfs, infrequently-used files may be swapped to disk, at which point tmpfs starts behaving like a non-persistent disk-based filesystem. i.e., it becomes useful for things you'd like cleaned up on reboot. -- :wq
