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

[M A Young]

On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Lennart Poettering wrote:

> On Mon, 02.04.12 16:55, Steve Grubb (sgrubb at redhat.com) wrote:
>>
>> What about forensics? Any reboot erases information that might have been needed
>> to see what happened during a break in.
>
> /tmp is already volatile and cleaned up in regular intervals. The new
> clean-up on boot is just one tiny bit of additional clean-up.

there is a big difference however with files in /tmp being around for 30 
days, and the files being cleaned on a reboot, which might be necessary to 
get the system in a reliable enough state to do any forensics.

This also means a big change in user experience as many will be expecting 
things in /tmp to remain there for a while before being deleted even if 
the system is restarted or crashes.

 	Michael Young