On 09/25/09 09:58 PM, David Magda wrote:
The contents of /var/tmp can be expected to survive between boots (e.g., /var/tmp/vi.recover); /tmp is nuked on power cycles (because it's just memory/swap):
Yes, but does mapping it to /tmp have any issues regarding booting or image-update in the context of this thread? IMO nuking is a good thing - /tmp and /var/tmp get really cluttered up after a few months, the downside of robust hardware and software :-). Not sure I really care about recovering vi edits in the case of UPS failure...
If a program is creating and deleting large numbers of files, and those files aren't needed between reboots, then it really should be using /tmp.
Quite. But some lazy programmer of 3rd party software decided to use the default tmpnam() function and I don't have access to the code :-(. tmpnam() The tmpnam() function always generates a file name using the path prefix defined as P_tmpdir in the <stdio.h> header. On Solaris systems, the default value for P_tmpdir is /var/tmp.
Similar definition for [/tmp] Linux FWIW:
Yes, but unless they fixed it recently (>=RHFC11), Linux doesn't actually nuke /tmp, which seems to be mapped to disk. One side effect is that (like MSWindows) AFAIK there isn't a native tmpfs, so programs that create and destroy large numbers of files run orders of magnitude slower there than on Solaris - assuming the application doesn't use /var/tmp for them :-). Compilers and code generators are typical of applications that do this, though they don't usually do synchronous i/o as said programmer appears to have done. I suppose /var/tmp on zfs would never actually write these files unless they were written synchronously. In the context of this thread, for those of us with space constrained boot disks/ssds, is it OK to map /var/tmp to /tmp, and /var/crash, /var/dump, and swap to a separate data pool in the context of being able to reboot and install new images? I've been doing so for a long time now with no problems that I know of. Just wondering what the gurus think... Havn't seen any definitive response regrading /opt, which IMO should be a good candidate since the installer makes it a separate fs anyway. /usr/local can definitely be kept on a separate pool. I wouldn't move /root. I keep a separate /export/home/root and have root cd to it via a script in /root that also sets HOME, although I noticed on snv123 that logging on as root succeeded even though it couldn't find bash (defaulted to using sh). This may be a snv123 bug, but it is a huge improvement on past behavior. I daresay logging on as root might also work if root's home directory was awol. Haven't tried it... Cheers -- Frank _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss