[Trac #65] Temporary filesystems should be in RAM

Zarro Boogs per Child bugtracker at laptop.org
Tue Oct 3 14:43:10 EDT 2006


#65: Temporary filesystems should be in RAM
-------------------------------+--------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  wmb at firmworks.com  |        Owner:  marcelo
     Type:  enhancement        |       Status:  new    
 Priority:  high               |    Milestone:  BTest-1
Component:  kernel             |   Resolution:         
 Keywords:                     |  
-------------------------------+--------------------------------------------
Comment (by marcelo):

 Using tmpfs for /tmp (and other temporary directories) is not a good idea
 given the small amount of RAM available.

 To avoid extra writes the system should keep data written to temporary
 locations in RAM as long as possible, but as soon as memory pressure is
 detected those should be written back to their (NAND flash) backing
 storage.

 Currently Linux allows setting of a system-wide dirty data expiration
 period, at mm/page-writeback.c:

  /*
  * The longest number of jiffies for which data is allowed to remain dirty
  */
 int dirty_expire_interval = 30 * HZ;

 Being able to configure such setting per-filesystem would be ideal.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/65#comment:8>
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