On 01/25/2014 11:44 PM, Linda Walsh wrote:
Mine hasn't been on the root partition for about 10 years.
I didn't want to destabilize root by having alot of r/w activity on the root partition, so my /tmp 'really' on my /var partition -- that was named for it's 'variable' state. mounting /var and using "rbind" to mount a dir one /tmp, is an early step.
There are and there have been in the past many good reasons to have /tmp treated differently. * once there was a vulnerability which could simply be mitigated by having /tmp on a separate partition. maybe that will recur. * some applications such a the C/C++ development cycle creates a lot of transient activity on /tmp with the intermediate files of the compile process. having /tmp on a separate spindle offers a parallelism that helps here. * in the limiting case of the above a tmpfs /tmp would make that even faster, but many applications want the memory. * Mike Tilson once developed a FS overlay that he used for /tmp which images part of the FS, the inodes and root directory, into memory in a way similar to a tmpfs. This was on 'development' machines and was a very successful accelerator. * one of the problems of DOS/Windows is that can't make the root 'read only' since it needs activity. Yes you can create a D: partition and move the swap file off C: but it still needs to have C: writeable. Not so for Linux. You can set it up, assuming you aren't doing upgrades, with the root partition READ-ONLY. Yes you need to migrate other things off the root partition and perhaps set symlinks (heck, there are a lot under /etc/ anyway!) and rbind. Having binaries and libraries RO is a great defence against hackers and malware. * partitioning is just that. it can also put a cap on abuses and mistakes. As has been pointed out with today's large disks, having a very large /tmp partition isn't a problem, but there is no need to make your whole system one files system[1]. [1] That being said, I do have a system where its all one partition - an experimental system running BtrFS, but that's also on an old 20G drive. -- Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes. -- JFK -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org