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Bug#245465: tmpfs for /tmp



I followed this discussion and finally thought about what are we using tmpfiles for...

Josselin Mouette schrieb:
Le samedi 10 novembre 2007 à 14:44 +0100, Frans Pop a écrit :
D-I does allow setting up a system without swap and I have seen installation reports where users actually did that.
There's nothing we can do against users shooting themselves in the foot.
Of course, in most cases that will be on systems with a fair amount of RAM, but maybe it would be a good idea to not set up tmpfs in that case (and just let tmp be part of /).
In that case the user is just screwed, but it is indeed better to not
make things worse by setting up tmpfs. I'm attaching a new version of
the corresponding script.
I see some typical applications where huge tmp comes into place:
Say i'm processing huge amount of data (but i'm not using a database-like thing). Sometimes it makes sense to place chunks of huge files into tmp - such as expanded images, parts of a huge pdf build, ...

There are apps use tmp in this way to get rid if memory usage for things which need e.g. no continous permanent random access - say few writes, few reads (in my case: one write, one read). This generally is associated with the intention to have RAM and swap untouched, unpolluted and system resources perform as none such resources where used.

I'm processing this way huge amount of data (Gigabyte PDFs with image data) and never associated using /tmp to relate memory or swap usage. My memory and swap would not be enough to do so...

In general i think /tmp should remain some own idea and mapping it into memory with tmpfs by default is odd...
But could be my point of view is dinosaur-like...

This behaviour as an option i would vote for ;-)
Am i so far from todays world?




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