Fedora 18 Will Stick To Using Tmpfs

[GreatEmerald]

Nooo, if I can replace Adobe Flash I will gladly do. I'am against replacing a functioning machine to accomodate Adobe Flash misbehaving in tmpfs. A bigger RAM would mitigate the problem, while it's not really necessary.

And there is always the option to, you know, not to mount /tmp as tmpfs. The /etc/fstab file and all.

[Rexilion]

And there is always the option to, you know, not to mount /tmp as tmpfs. The /etc/fstab file and all.

That is exactly what I did. However, I expected that Adobe Flash misbehaving in this regard would be a prime argument. And I'm suprised this was not (explicitly) mentioned.

Like it or not, it's still integrated in many sites :/ . And most of the time, the functionality it provides can be replaced by a gif file (like ads). Or a somewhat more advanced webpage using JS and the like. The fact that YouTube is migrating to html5 is a really good thing, I hope that many will follow soon. That will effectively extend the lifetime of my old HW since HTML5 is accelerated by the GPU whilst Flash generally is not...

As a sidenote, I find it very inconvenient that this plugin won't listen to TMP or TMPDIR variables (last time I checked). Then I could have fixed it whilst keeping /tmp as a tmpfs filesystem...

[GreatEmerald]

As a sidenote, I find it very inconvenient that this plugin won't listen to TMP or TMPDIR variables (last time I checked). Then I could have fixed it whilst keeping /tmp as a tmpfs filesystem...

That's interesting, wouldn't it be possible to do it the other way round, then - export TMP or TMPDIR as /tmp/tmp and set /tmp/tmp as tmpfs, while leaving /tmp as regular space for all those poorly designed programs out there?

[Rexilion]

That's interesting, wouldn't it be possible to do it the other way round, then - export TMP or TMPDIR as /tmp/tmp and set /tmp/tmp as tmpfs, while leaving /tmp as regular space for all those poorly designed programs out there?

that's insane, reread what you just typed

[Ericg]

that's insane, reread what you just typed

Actually not that insane, confusing yes since theyre both named tmp but the idea works for those program who break FHS by storing large files in /tmp AND also dont respect $TMPDIR

[Rexilion]

Actually not that insane, confusing yes since theyre both named tmp but the idea works for those program who break FHS by storing large files in /tmp AND also dont respect $TMPDIR

The fact that they are both named tmp is the thing that bothers me the least.

The fact that you two are thinking it's a viable solution suprises me. Moving around important pieces of infrastructure, just to get a browser plugin functioning under every circumstance and to use a TMP variable that points to a tmpfs fs, is not a good idea.

The elegance of using a seperate dedicated fs for /tmp was (for me) to enable noexec and friends, and to prevent misbehaving programs filling my root partition. This utterly fails right now because of a browser plugin -_-' dumping it's entire RTMP stream to disk...

[droste]

The fact that they are both named tmp is the thing that bothers me the least.

The fact that you two are thinking it's a viable solution suprises me. Moving around important pieces of infrastructure, just to get a browser plugin functioning under every circumstance and to use a TMP variable that points to a tmpfs fs, is not a good idea.

The elegance of using a seperate dedicated fs for /tmp was (for me) to enable noexec and friends, and to prevent misbehaving programs filling my root partition. This utterly fails right now because of a browser plugin -_-' dumping it's entire RTMP stream to disk...

Recent version of flash don't do that anymore (at least on my pc there are no flash* files in /tmp when flash videos are running). And for larger files or files that should survive a reboot there's /var/tmp.

[GreatEmerald]

The elegance of using a seperate dedicated fs for /tmp was (for me) to enable noexec and friends, and to prevent misbehaving programs filling my root partition. This utterly fails right now because of a browser plugin -_-' dumping it's entire RTMP stream to disk...

So, the elegance of using tmpfs is to have misbehaving programs fill your entire RAM instead of your root partition? I fail to see the logic in that. Again it seems like you can't have a third option, it's either one or the other.

[Rexilion]

Recent version of flash don't do that anymore (at least on my pc there are no flash* files in /tmp when flash videos are running). And for larger files or files that should survive a reboot there's /var/tmp.

The files are not visible in /tmp because flash creates them and then deletes them immediatly, but keeping it's fd's open. If you do a 'lsof -p $PID' where $PID contains the process handling the flash files you will see a reference to '/tmp/Flash-<numbershere> (deleted)'. These fd's can be accessed by /proc/$PID/$FD.

Sidenote, free size of the partition which holds /tmp shrinks.

I use the '$PID and $FD trick' in a script so VLC can open these files on my parents computer. They start the flash app in the browser, press pause to let it buffer the video and click on a script. VLC then opens mentioning the fd and then they click on it to display the video in full screen at full quality.

If I let Flash render the video it's choppy and skippy, since everything is apparently done on the CPU. While VLC offloads it to the GPU (nouveau!). So the computer is able to meet today's demands. However, things have turned out bad when it comes to video streaming.

So, the elegance of using tmpfs is to have misbehaving programs fill your entire RAM instead of your root partition? I fail to see the logic in that. Again it seems like you can't have a third option, it's either one or the other.

I did not say or imply that. I said it would be an elegant solution if there were no such programs exhibiting this behaviour. And if they (mistakenly) did, the consequences would not be huge since I limit tmpfs usage to about 25% of system RAM.

However, Flash is doing this on purpose and I cannot make it change it's behaviour unless I apply the '/tmp/tmp' trick which is IMHO not 'nice'.

[GreatEmerald]

I use the '$PID and $FD trick' in a script so VLC can open these files on my parents computer. They start the flash app in the browser, press pause to let it buffer the video and click on a script. VLC then opens mentioning the fd and then they click on it to display the video in full screen at full quality.

That's pretty clever. I typically don't need that when dealing with YouTube, as VLC can open its streams directly, but it's an interesting way of doing it for unsupported websites.

However, Flash is doing this on purpose and I cannot make it change it's behaviour unless I apply the '/tmp/tmp' trick which is IMHO not 'nice'.

Oh, so you mean that you'd rather save some disk space while sacrificing some RAM if possible, but if not, have it write to disk? But then doesn't that happen already when using tmpfs with a swap partition/file?

And of course, the trick is not nice, but then your case is fairly isolated. There are few people with old PCs that use tmpfs and watch Flash videos. And since Flash is proprietary, not much can be done about it (unless you switch to Gnash/Lightspark).