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Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it useless



On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 01:21:43PM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
As you wrote, nothing is infinite. I don't think that /tmp is worse than
/home like other said. Your /home could become full as well.

Your /home could be a network share like NFS and /tmp a local partition, so you don’t want to use /home for temporary downloads or caches. Besides that, on multi-user systems /tmp can be used to share files (I’ve downloaded the current ISO image to /tmp, so you can copy it from there). This is much better than to open access to your $HOME directory.

And I think, it is clear as well that your disk space will always be much bigger than your RAM size. It seems very strange to waste RAM for a ramdisk to free disk space.

I don’t think that there is a sane default as well. A desktop system which runs several VMs will probably not like to waste RAM for tmpfs.

But since we are talking about defaults, how does d-i partition your hard disk in the following cases?

a) Notebook
   4 GB RAM
   250GB disk

b) PC
   4 GB RAM
   2TB disk

If it creates 4 or 8 GB swap and a single partition for the remaining disk, tmpfs will never beat disk space.

If the admin decides to partition manually he will know what he does (or he should ;-). My PC is normally used remote and acts more like a server. It uses tmpfs, but its size is only 635M, so I already have problems creating a CD ISO. Since the system has 2 TB disk space, my next repartitioning will create a separate /tmp with about 10 or 20 GB, much easier to spare than RAM.

So I don’t see the advantage of using tmpfs as default, but d-i should offer the option to put /tmp on tmpfs if the admin wishes it.

Shade and sweet water!

	Stephan

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| Stephan Seitz          E-Mail: stse@fsing.rootsland.net |
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