From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Aug 15 9:20:25 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from chmls05.mediaone.net (chmls05.mediaone.net [24.147.1.143]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2C3CA37BB6B; Tue, 15 Aug 2000 09:20:21 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from pulsifer@mediaone.net) Received: from ahp3 (ahp.ne.mediaone.net [24.128.184.250]) by chmls05.mediaone.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id MAA29010; Tue, 15 Aug 2000 12:20:19 -0400 (EDT) From: "Allen Pulsifer" To: Cc: Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 12:20:20 -0400 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2911.0) Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I am trying to figure out what to do with my /tmp directory under FBSD 4.1 I noticed that /tmp currently lives on the root file system, where I am unable to get the benefit of softupdates or mounting "nosuid". (Is that true?) The handbook mentions mounting the swap partition on /tmp using the MFS. To quote from http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/kernelconfig-config.html: --------------------------------------------------------------------------- options MFS #Memory Filesystem options MD_ROOT #MD is a potential root device This is the memory-mapped filesystem. This is basically a RAM disk for fast storage of temporary files, useful if you have a lot of swap space that you want to take advantage of. A perfect place to mount an MFS partition is on the /tmp directory, since many programs store temporary data here. To mount an MFS RAM disk on /tmp, add the following line to /etc/fstab: /dev/ad1s2b /tmp mfs rw 0 0 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I thought I had read on one of the FBSD mailing lists that the MFS is now basically obsolete. As I understood it, the regular file system has sophisticated caching built in and effectively acts like a memory file system if the files are small enough. Conversely, using the MFS results in two stages of caching and wastes RAM. Is that correct? I noticed Matt Dillon wrote a handbook section on the VM system at http://www.freeBSD.org/handbook/internals-vm.html that includes some info on tuning, but it doesn't mention what to do with /tmp. So what's the bottom line? Should I leave /tmp on the root file system, create a dedicated partition for /tmp, or mount the swap partition on /tmp using the MFS? Thanks, Allen To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message