Fedora 18 Will Stick To Using Tmpfs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 18 Will Stick To Using Tmpfs

It was decided at today's FESCo meeting to not disable the mounting of /tmp as a tmpfs file-system by default for the forthcoming Fedora 18 Linux release...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI0MzY

[droidhacker]

Yeah, those two bugs are VERY much corner-cases. About VM's; you don't design your operating system for the purpose of being subservient to something else. You design it for the bare metal and just to not be exceedingly incompatible with VM's. It is definitely up to the user shoehorning it in to a VM to make trivial adjustments like this. The Fedora installer still provides configuration options for handling /tmp, its just set to DEFAULT to tmpfs.

Regarding the other case, installation process with a bajillion repos, I don't think that one even applies to begin with, since you can't use a /tmp on disk before the disk has been partitioned/formatted. The installation process, by definition, MUST have /tmp in RAM.

[varikonniemi]

Regarding the other case, installation process with a bajillion repos, I don't think that one even applies to begin with, since you can't use a /tmp on disk before the disk has been partitioned/formatted. The installation process, by definition, MUST have /tmp in RAM.

This also confused me, and according to the irc logs not even they really knew what that bug report was about.

[curaga]

Been using /tmp on tmpfs since 2006. Glad to see Fedora finally catching up

[Rexilion]

Adobe Flash player misbehaves in this regard

Adobe Flash easily stuffs 300MB+ files inside /tmp/, the files are called flash-* (if I remember correctly). Took me 10 minutes to figure out why my parents computer (512MB of RAM) kept crashing once they were watching the national tv archive.

Every 20 minutes the darned thing would crash because Adobe puts temporary files inside /tmp whenever it is streaming over RTMP (I think). Youtube vids don't suffer from this problem. The size of these things can go over 700MB easily (high quality video).

I'm really suprised no one ever mentioned this before!

[disi]

Adobe Flash easily stuffs 300MB+ files inside /tmp/, the files are called flash-* (if I remember correctly). Took me 10 minutes to figure out why my parents computer (512MB of RAM) kept crashing once they were watching the national tv archive.

Every 20 minutes the darned thing would crash because Adobe puts temporary files inside /tmp whenever it is streaming over RTMP (I think). Youtube vids don't suffer from this problem. The size of these things can go over 700MB easily (high quality video).

I'm really suprised no one ever mentioned this before!

My AMD netbook, from 1.5 years ago, has 4GB RAM... actual my telephone has 512MB memory. Yes, it will happen that older hardware is not running smoothly with newer software.

Linux distributions have usually a much better support for older hardware, but at some stage it is better to use the more performant solution for most currently used hardware. There are lots of distribution which even still ship i386 binaries... maybe looking into something like that helps.

[Rexilion]

My AMD netbook, from 1.5 years ago, has 4GB RAM... actual my telephone has 512MB memory. Yes, it will happen that older hardware is not running smoothly with newer software.

Linux distributions have usually a much better support for older hardware, but at some stage it is better to use the more performant solution for most currently used hardware. There are lots of distribution which even still ship i386 binaries... maybe looking into something like that helps.

You are right that it's old hardware which should be replaced in the near future. Fun fact: Next year, there will be tablets that are faster than this box.

But, this post does not have the intention to say: You should support really old hardware. In fact, Adobe already effectively stopped releasing Adobe Flash for this generation of hardware by including SSE2 instruction that are not supported by it's CPU.

My post was about the fact that *none* of the objections are about misbehaving pieces of software. It is mentioned as an argument that there *could* be misbehaving software. But no one is mentioning Flash Player, and THAT suprises me.

I'm just saying that Adobe is (apparently) placing the files in an incorrect location. Using tmpfs as /tmp makes matters much worse for misbehaving software.

Still, as a response to your post, I'm against replacing perfectly working computer hardware to accomodate misdesigned software! And if I was a REAL laggard and wanted to stick with whatever I had, I would have had a typewriter. It's state of the art: Printer and screen IN ONE! :P .

[lsatenstein]

Simpler English

Phoronix: Fedora 18 Will Stick To Using Tmpfs

It was decided at today's FESCo meeting to not disable the mounting of /tmp as a tmpfs file-system by default for the forthcoming Fedora 18 Linux release...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI0MzY

==
If I understand this, tmpfs is ram, /tmp will be mounted to ram (as does Debian) /tmp contents will be erased after each boot. It is a scratch pad area.

[GreatEmerald]

Still, as a response to your post, I'm against replacing perfectly working computer hardware to accomodate misdesigned software! And if I was a REAL laggard and wanted to stick with whatever I had, I would have had a typewriter. It's state of the art: Printer and screen IN ONE! :P .

Wait, so you're against replacing Adobe Flash (the "misdesigned software"), and against replacing the hardware. I'm afraid there are no other options left...

[Rexilion]

Wait, so you're against replacing Adobe Flash (the "misdesigned software"), and against replacing the hardware. I'm afraid there are no other options left...

Nooo, if I can replace Adobe Flash I will gladly do. I'am against replacing a functioning machine to accomodate Adobe Flash misbehaving in tmpfs. A bigger RAM would mitigate the problem, while it's not really necessary.