/tmp on tmpfs (was: Re: Summary/Minutes for today's FESCo meeting (2012-04-02))

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Mon Apr 2 19:58:12 UTC 2012


On Mon, Apr 02, 2012 at 08:32:56PM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
> * #834 F18 Feature: /tmp on tmpfs -
>   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/tmp-on-tmpfs  (mitr, 17:40:06)
>   * AGREED: tmp-on-tmpfs is accepted (+5 -3)  (mitr, 18:12:52)

Actually I think this is a good feature, but ...

The feature page is wrong about "The user experience should barely
change.  This is mostly a low-level change that has little visibility
to the user."

tmpfs is different in a number of important ways:

 - it's very limited in space compared to a real disk

 - it doesn't support O_DIRECT

 - it doesn't support user extended attrs; and not very old kernels
   didn't support any xattrs at all, meaning things like SELinux
   labels don't work

All this means it's going to need a bit more testing, since
potentially any package that stores a file on /tmp should be tested
and may need to be fixed.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
New in Fedora 11: Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows
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