Excerpts from Martin Pitt's message of 2016-01-13 14:00:16 -0800: > Ben Howard [2016-01-13 14:26 +0200]: > > On the Ubuntu Cloud Images, we have a request to make /tmp a tmpfs. The > > rationale, from the bug: > > * Performance - much faster read/write access to data in /tmp > > * Security - sensitive data would be cleared from memory on boot, > > rather than written (leaked) to disk -- important for encryption > > scenarios > > > > Since the Ubuntu Cloud Images are used by a wide number of users, I > > wanted to gather feedback and gather consensus on whether or not we > > should make this change. > > I really wish we would do this in general for new installs, at least > as the first thing after releasing 16.04 LTS. I also do this on my > boxes, not only for the reasons above [1], but also because it is much > more power efficient -- as I literally work in /tmp a lot of my time > the disk doesn't need to spin up often. >
You know they have these new disks that don't "spin"... ;-) > The main reason AFAIK why we didn't yet do that was the concern that > there is some broken software out there which potentially dumps really > large files into /tmp (yes firefox, I'm looking at YOU!). These would > need to be fixed to go to /var/tmp. This is a chicken-and-egg problem, > though: We won't find out what's broken until we actually enable it on > real-life installations. This problem applies to cloud image use cases > just as much as desktop or "classic" servers. MySQL and MariaDB are a perfect example of /tmp abuse. If you alter a table in the InnoDB storage engine that can be rebuilt on-line, it will create a copy of the table in the server's tmpdir. Currently these both default tmpdir to /tmp. I've been bit by this several times when on boxes with tmpfs of 1GB. -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
