[conspire] /var/tmp - non-volatile: Re: VMs, qemu-kvm, ...

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> >Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2018 21:58:49 -0800
> >From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> >To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> >Subject: Re: [conspire] VMs, qemu-kvm, ...
> >Message-ID: <20181222055849.GK7928 at linuxmafia.com>
> 
> >I'm not there yet.)  Need to consider what in addition to /tmp and
> >/var/tmp to mount as tmpfs.
> 
> Per FHS[1], etc.[2]

> /var/tmp[3] is non-volatile - notably files *are* preserved in /var/tmp
> across reboot, so tmpfs isn't suitable for /var/tmp.

It is if I decide it is.  

I was fully aware of the FHS statement of convention.  You'll note that
it says that data stored in /var/tmp is typically deleted in a
site-specific manner, so the matter used on my site might just be
'rebooting'.  ;->

/var/tmp is used for things like vi (ex, sudoedit...) recovery files and
cache filesthat you would certainly miss if you weren't aware that
rebooting would make them go away, but if you _do_ know rebooting will
clean them out that's not inherently a problem.

It's a standard tradeoff question in Unix discussions, e.g.,
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/86297/what-can-go-wrong-if-var-tmp-is-on-a-temporary-filesystem

FWIW, I've found that there's very little that ever uses /var/tmp on my
systems, except for vi recovery files.