Question on /var/run, tmpfs and initscripts

Ville Skyttä ville.skytta at iki.fi
Wed Feb 11 15:44:53 UTC 2009


On Wednesday 11 February 2009, Harald Hoyer wrote:
> Paul Wouters wrote:
> >
> > I've been optimizing a system for flash, and wanted to have /var/run
> > be a tmpfs mount, so that these writes to not wear down the flash/ssd.

I've done something similar, but not for flash/ssd reasons, but rather to get 
a plain old HDD in my PVR spun down as much (and as easily) as possible, 
using the read only root feature.  Or actually only the temporary state part 
of it.

> You could use the readonlyroot feature and customize /etc/rwtab,
> /etc/sysconfig/readonly-root

What I find lacking in that feature for my scenario is that there's no out of 
the box way to persist the temporary state stuff on tmpfs back to disk on 
shutdown.  So I did a rather crude hack to accomplish that at FC-6 time, and 
I think I'm still using the exactly same one with good success even though 
the box has been upgraded several times meanwhile, it's at F-10 currently.  
The hack and the RFE is at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/223722

There are not too many packages that drop /etc/rwtab.d snippets, so as Harald 
said, it's quite likely that customizing /etc/rwtab is needed in many 
scenarios.  It'd be great if more packages took care of that out of the box 
(see for example the vdr and vdradmin-am packages if interested).




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