Re: ReiserFS on blank hard drive
On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 01:35:03AM -0800, Ethan Benson wrote:
> because /var and /tmp have no business being on the root partition.
> they should be seperate partitions (or if you use 2.4 kernels /tmp
> should perhaps be tmpfs. anyone have any docs/info on advantages of
> this?)
ext2 is probably fast enough for /tmp. It does aggressive meta-data
caching, which is why it's so fast, and why Solaris snobs et. al. say that
Linux isn't ready for production environments. (ext2 is too prone to
massive corruption if the system goes down at a bad moment.) There is a
fair bit of truth to that accusation, AFAIK. Solaris's ufs filesystem (I
think that's what they use) is a lot more resilient, but slower for creating
and deleting files with the kind of pattern that /tmp sees.
I'm not sure why linux has a tmpfs, but probably for people running XFS and
stuff like that where creation and deletion require disk IO. An ext2 /tmp
would work well, even if the rest of the system was XFS or reiserfs.
The main disadvantage is that tmpfs uses your swap/RAM space if you leave
files sitting around in it. You can set limits on how much space is used,
so dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/hax0r doesn't bring the system to its knees, but
it's still something to worry about. (BTW, this is why you don't want to
use RAMFS. It doesn't have limit checking, but it works similarly.)
Caveat: I haven't used anything but ext2 on my own machines.
--
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)
"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE
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