On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 11:00:16PM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote: > 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. > 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. > My gut feeling is that we should do it if there is ≥ 4 GB RAM, so that > /tmp as at least 2 GB of space (That should be a rather simple > installer/cloud-init decision?). We don't want to do this on small > embedded devices with 512 MB of RAM or so, but there is absolutely no > reason to not do it on beefy servers or laptops. As a data point, I used to have my /tmp on tmpfs while I still had a spinning disk, in order to address the power usage issues of disk flushing. I found it to be a least-bad option which led to serious degradation of desktop interactivity in the face of even moderate memory usage (at the time, with 4GB RAM), and not because of excessive /tmp usage. And as others in this thread have noted, this same problem can occur in cloud instances. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ [email protected] [email protected]
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