Fedora 18 Will Go For Tmpfs

Fedora 18 will look to use tmpfs for its /tmp directory, after the feature proposal was approved today by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.

FESCo approved the Fedora 18 feature proposal at today's weekly meeting, with the notes being available from the mailing list archive. The main discussion item today was the use of tmpfs.

Fedora 18 is expected to use tmpfs for mounting the /tmp directory, which sees that the temporary directory is stored in RAM/SWAP volatile memory. Tmpfs tends to generate less disk reads/writes, potentially saves power while inreasing performance, sees that the temporary directory data isn't stored across reboots, and other advantages. System administrators installing new Fedora installations are still expected to be able to opt-out of using tmpfs.

Debian developers have already express plans to use tmpfs with their next release, Ubuntu is making similar plans, and Arch Linux (among others) already default to tmpfs storage.

Additional information on this Fedora 18 feature plan is available from the Fedora Project Wiki. Some of the other Fedora 18 feature plans are documented in this article. Also approved at today's meeting for Fedora 18 was upgrading to GHC 7.4, the latest Glasgow Haskell Compiler release.