Re: PATCH: allow percentile size of tmpfs (2.5.66 / 2.4.20-pre2)

Hugh Dickins
2003-04-01T16:32:21Z

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003, Christoph Rohland wrote:
> On Tue, 01 Apr 2003, Ed Tomlinson wrote:
> > What does tmpfs have to do with ram size? Its swappable. This
> > _might_ be useful for ramfs but for tmpfs, IMHO, its not a good
> > idea.
>
> I agree and I think if you add this option it should adjust to a
> percentage of (ram + swap). With this it would be a really nice
> improvement.
> I even had patches for this but to do it efficently you would need to
> add some hooks to swapon and swapoff.

You surprise me, Christoph, I'd expected you to approve of CaT's.

If tmpfs already defaulted to 50% of ram+swap, then I'd agree
with you. But it has all along been in terms of RAM, so I think
it's better to continue in that way. (We could add options to
allow +swap in too, but I'm not terribly interested.)

If people really wanted their tmpfs pages to go out to disk, I think
they'd be choosing a more sophisticated filesystem to manage that:
swap is a vital overflow area for tmpfs, not its home.

Hugh