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On 05/24/2017 08:16 AM, Ian Zimmerman wrote: |
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> So what are gentoo users' opinions on this matter of faith? |
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> |
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> I have long been in the camp that thinks tmpfs for /tmp has no |
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> advantages (and may have disadvantages) over a normal filesystem like |
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> ext3, because the files there are normally so small that they will stay |
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> in the page cache 100% of the time. |
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> |
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> But I see that tmpfs is the default with systemd. Surely they have a |
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> good reason for this? :) |
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Their reason is described here: |
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https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/APIFileSystems |
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It seems that they consider it an important *default* to have /tmp exist |
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even if nothing else exists yet during boot-up. |
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Normally I wouldn't care too much whether /tmp is tmpfs or not. The only |
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cases where I do care, is when unpacking a huge tarball with contents I |
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didn't intend to keep around. But I stopped doing that in /tmp anyway. I |
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have my own ~/tmp for that now. When using /tmp for that, you need to rm |
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-rf what you don't need anymore, since it eats up RAM. |
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Another case is when I download something big that I intend to install |
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(*.bin installers) or unpack into a final location on disk. In those |
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cases, /tmp on tmpfs helps since it lowers disk fragmentation: you |
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download it to RAM, then install to disk. |
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