Sysinstall automatic filesystem size generation.

[Oliver Fromme]

Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
 > Jon Dama wrote:
 > > yes, that's quite generous.
 > > 
 > > why isn't /tmp just an mfs mount though?
 > 
 > While I like that suggestion personally, some people get perturbed about files 
 > in /tmp going away if the power fails or you reboot.

Then those people should use /var/tmp instead of /tmp.

Traditional UNIX behaviour is that contents of /var/tmp
must survive a reboot, while contents of /tmp are not
guaranteed to survive a reboot (and in fact, /tmp might
be cleaned completely at regular time intervals via a
periodic cron job or similar).  That's why vi puts its
recovery files under /var/tmp, not /tmp.

However, there are still cases where it's not desirable to
make /tmp a memory-based file system, e.g. on systems that
have little RAM and/or no swap (or NFS swap).  Also, some
people argue that a UFS disk partition with softupdates (or
even async) is fast enough for most purposes to be mounted
on /tmp.  (For what it's worth, I've seen systems set up in
a way to newfs the /tmp partiton on reboot.)

Therefore, I think the best solution would be to make it an
option in sysinstall:  If the user doesn't create a separate
partiton for /tmp in the partition editor, ask him whether
he would like to make /tmp a memory-based file system.  Or
implement a special hotkey in the partition editor for
creating a memory-based file system -- I guess this would
be the easiest way to implement it.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
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