DragonFlyBSD

On 07/01/11 08:34, Peter Avalos (via DragonFly issue tracker) wrote:

New submission from Peter Avalos <peter@theshell.com>:

Shouldn't we default to having /tmp/ as tmpfs instead of HAMMER?

I don't think that's a good idea. If someone wants their /tmp as tmpfs,
then they can do so easily enough by changing the fstab entry.

The main reason against this is, imo, that tmpfs is a memory file
system and can hence be problematic on machines with limited RAM and/or
large files in the /tmp directory.

Regards,
Alex

I think for new installations we should default to tmpfs, but maybe add some logic in there that detects low RAM/swap situations. This could be similar to the way we handle HAMMER installs. We don't want people to install a HAMMER fs if their disk is too small, which is comparable to the issue of having too little memory for tmpfs.

This comes down to how much is too little memory ?

Looking at a few different machines, I see a typical /tmp uses only a few kilobytes.