[arch-general] Can't create /tmp/.X11-unix and /tmp/.ICE-unix while booting

[Tom Gundersen]

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 8:26 PM, Myra Nelson <myra.nelson at hughes.net> wrote:
> Just before I do something stupid, I thought I would ask about these
> apparent errors.
>
> Mon May 30 11:49:39 2011: ^[[1;34;40m:: ^[[1;37;40mRemoving Leftover
> Files^[[1;0m ^[[s^[[151G
> ^[[1;34;40m[^[[0;36;40mBUSY^[[1;34;40m]^[[1;0m /bin/mkdir: cannot
> create directory `/tmp/.X11-unix': File exists
> Mon May 30 11:49:40 2011: /bin/mkdir: cannot create directory
> `/tmp/.ICE-unix': File exists
>
> My boot log goes back to 12 May 2011 so that's the earliest I can
> verify this data. I've search flyspray for any bug reports about
> this and didn't find any. Should these two files be deleted on
> shutdown or should they not be created on boot? If they should be
> deleted, where is the error?

The bug report you are looking for is this one:
<https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/24279>. It was closed as the fix is
already in git (but not yet released):
<http://projects.archlinux.org/initscripts.git/commit/?id=cc1b8a39309fef45d092140fa130d0e82c696a44>.

Summary: the change was unintentionally introduced by me when changing
some nearby code. It only affects people who have /tmp mounted on a
non-tmpfs partition (people who just leave /tmp on the rootfs are not
affected). The fix will be included in the next release.

Since I already have your attention, I'd like to suggest you do the following:

Turn the partiton that is currently holding your /tmp into swapspace
Mount /tmp as tmpfs setting size= the size of your old /tmp partition.

In addition to solving the bug in question, it will give you better
performance, save power (fewer writes to disk) and increase the amount
of available swap, without increasing the RAM usage.

For a discussion of why this is almost always the right thing to do
(unless you happen to have files larger than 256GB on your /tmp), have
a look at the above bug report.

Cheers,

Tom