[9fans] [poll] Do you have ramfs backing your /tmp?

[9fans] [poll] Do you have ramfs backing your /tmp?

[hahahahacker2009]

The Unix world usually have /tmp cleared or backed by tmpfs.  This is
not the default with Plan 9.  So, anyone start ramfs in your
$home/lib/profile?  With what flags?  Why you want or don't want to
have /tmp backed by ramfs?

For me, I sometime find it useful to review the .[ch] files and directories in my /tmp, but the acme temporary files are so big, which make me wanted to use ramfs.
term% du -h *.someacme | grep -v '^0'
727k    A179.someacme
968k    A182.someacme
904k    A191.someacme
650k    A193.someacme
983k    C181.someacme


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Re: [9fans] [poll] Do you have ramfs backing your /tmp?

[red]

> The Unix world usually have /tmp cleared or backed by tmpfs.  This is
> not the default with Plan 9.  So, anyone start ramfs in your
> $home/lib/profile?  With what flags?  Why you want or don't want to
> have /tmp backed by ramfs?

eh, i vary.

on my terminals i use ramfs because i only bind my
home directory instead of the root, since my link
to the file server is extremely slow

on drawterm, it just uses other's $home/tmp

and i haven't really found a situation where i
wanted anything from $home/tmp anyway

more often than not i store temporary stuff
in $home/lib, because it turns out they are
not always temporary after all, so it's nice
to have them snapshotted

Re: [9fans] [poll] Do you have ramfs backing your /tmp?

[umbraticus via 9fans]

switched to ramfs a few years ago to
prevent habit of dumping a bunch
of stuff there I actually used.

umbraticus

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Re: [9fans] [poll] Do you have ramfs backing your /tmp?

[a]

I went back and forth on this for a few years, but eventually
found enough times I wanted to explicitly save something across
a reboot that I'd manually stashed in /tmp that I stopped. It's
not a bad idea, just depends on your usage patterns.

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Re: [9fans] [poll] Do you have ramfs backing your /tmp?

[Skip Tavakkolian]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1015 bytes --]

Typically DMTMP bit is set for tmp locations to exclude them from
archiving. Then cleaning on startup should be sufficient, no?

On Tue, Mar 3, 2026, 6:47 AM <hahahahacker2009@gmail.com> wrote:

> The Unix world usually have /tmp cleared or backed by tmpfs.  This is
> not the default with Plan 9.  So, anyone start ramfs in your
> $home/lib/profile?  With what flags?  Why you want or don't want to
> have /tmp backed by ramfs?
> 
> For me, I sometime find it useful to review the .[ch] files and
> directories in my /tmp, but the acme temporary files are so big, which make
> me wanted to use ramfs.
> term% du -h *.someacme | grep -v '^0'
> 727k    A179.someacme
> 968k    A182.someacme
> 904k    A191.someacme
> 650k    A193.someacme
> 983k    C181.someacme
> 

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[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2390 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] [poll] Do you have ramfs backing your /tmp?

[ori]

Usually not, but I'll start a ramfs /tmp in a bunch of namespaces
when I'm going to be doing some scratch testing. Why? defaults,
didn't feel the need to change it.

Quoth hahahahacker2009@gmail.com:
> The Unix world usually have /tmp cleared or backed by tmpfs.  This is
> not the default with Plan 9.  So, anyone start ramfs in your
> $home/lib/profile?  With what flags?  Why you want or don't want to
> have /tmp backed by ramfs?
> 
> For me, I sometime find it useful to review the .[ch] files and directories in my /tmp, but the acme temporary files are so big, which make me wanted to use ramfs.
> term% du -h *.someacme | grep -v '^0'
> 727k    A179.someacme
> 968k    A182.someacme
> 904k    A191.someacme
> 650k    A193.someacme
> 983k    C181.someacme
> 

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Re: [9fans] [poll] Do you have ramfs backing your /tmp?

[umbraticus via 9fans]

yes, meant to add to my response: there are
plenty of ways to save persistent-but-not-dumped
files: chmod +t, depending how the underlying disk
fs supports it; mounting some other non-dumped
disk or partition somewhere convenient, different
gefs snapshot configurations, &c. &c. &c.

No need to overload /tmp for this.

umbraticus

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Re: [9fans] [poll] Do you have ramfs backing your /tmp?

[James Cook]

hahahahacker2009@gmail.com wrote:
> The Unix world usually have /tmp cleared or backed by tmpfs.  This is
> not the default with Plan 9.  So, anyone start ramfs in your
> $home/lib/profile?  With what flags?  Why you want or don't want to
> have /tmp backed by ramfs?

No, but I like to start some scripts with rfork n;ramfs so I don't have
to worry about naming their temp files and they get cleaned up
automatically.

-- 
James