Am 18.05.2011 18:34, schrieb Tom Gundersen:
First of all, this is what I took away from the discussion:
1) /tmp should always be mounted as tmpfs (there are some really obscure scenarios when it should not be (if you have individual files larger than 256GB on it))
In low-memory environments, this can be problematic. I had a problem with a third-party installer, because it extracted its files into /tmp. I had 512MB RAM back then, so my /tmp was 256MB only, which was not sufficient (I used no size= option, which was in Arch's default fstab back then).
2) if /tmp is not mounted as tmpfs it should always be cleared at boot
That said, some users disagree, and want to /tmp to be preserved on reboot. Usually I would deny such a request, but I figured it would actually simplify things, so why not.
/tmp is not supposed to be preserved between reboots. Some distributions do it (SuSE even leaves it entirely untouched by default, leading to 10 year old files in /tmp). If you want temporary files to be kept between reboots, use /var/tmp/. In my opinion, cleaning /tmp is the right thing to do.