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

Christoph Rohland
2003-04-02T07:10:00Z

Hi Hugh,

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> You surprise me, Christoph, I'd expected you to approve of CaT's.

look back into your mail store. I said this pretty early.

> 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.)

No, I always thought the 50% RAM was a terrible hack. And IMHO it is
one of the biggest usability gaps of tmpfs.

> 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.

I definitely want them to go there. It is a very sophisticated
mechinsm because by adding swap on _any_ storage I can grow my tmpfs
instances even temporarily.

If you now were able to take advantage of additional swap
automatically administration would be a no brainer. Also distributions
could add much saner defaults for /dev/shm or even use it for /tmp.

Greetings
Christoph