/tmp and /var/tmp

Posted Mar 31, 2011 2:20 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413)
In reply to: /tmp and /var/tmp by roblucid
Parent article: Introducing /run

1 - tmp is not meant to be small, it is meant to be temporary, it is only broken unixes which used special filessytems for tmp which could not support large temporary files, which do exist

2 - on Linux, at least (this is LWN) there is little advantage of tmpfs over a normal filesystem for tmp. Linux's filesystem layer is quite good about not needing to send out data to disk when unnecessary (a truly shortlived file may never see the disk at all), and for the longer lived or large file case you get perfectly reasonable behavior as well