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