Re: [HEADS-UP] Rawhide: /tmp is now on tmpfs

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On 05/31/2012 08:59 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
On Thu, 31.05.12 08:51, Matthew Miller (mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx) wrote:

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 12:55:28PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
Now /var/tmp should be "more persistent" which we don't need,
Correct, using /var/tmp is wrong and a mistake.

IMO, advising people to modify their code to using /var/tmp instead of /tmp
is absurd and evidence of ignorance towards traditional use of /tmp and the
FHS.
Well, not just FHS, but "traditional" usage within Red Hat and Fedora. For
as long as I can remember, /tmp has had a 10-day retention and /var/tmp
30-day.

Does that matter?
We still have 10d and 30d clean-up for that. With one addition though:
/tmp is also flushed on reboot.

Lennart


I'm still unsure what the point of this "feature" really is.

The wiki page lists the features as:

* By implementing this we, by default, generate less IO on disks. This increases SSD lifetime, saves a bit of power and makes things a bit faster.

Do we have actual numbers for this? It would seem like we already have this with ext4's deferred allocation and the pagecache.

* /tmp is automatically flushed at boot.

It seems like adding an rm to the startup sequence would do this with less surprises.


* We bring Fedora closer to commercial Unixes and other Linux distributions.

Um, so? Any solaris admin worth their salt kills the ram-based /tmp as soon as the install is finished. Its been that way since the 90's.

* We make the delta to stateless read-only systems smaller.

Why is this a win for the normal user?


The page says the user experience should barely change -- which I think is really downplaying the scope of this change.

Firstly, the cleanup of /tmp on reboot is a behavior change that is going to bite a lot of people, no matter how bold and large it appears in the release notes. This isn't terribly controversial, but it still sucks for those who get hit by it.

More importantly, the restriction that /tmp be used for files that are less than an installation-defined size is going to cause a lot of problems. Patching everything to use /var/tmp because we don't know how big the data file is going to be in advance just moves the problem somewhere else and doesn't solve anything. There are going to be mystery "disk full" messages and issues on low memory machines.

So why are we doing this again?  How is this a benefit to the normal user?

At the most, this should be an opt-in feature rather than the default.

Brian






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