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A deep dive into Debian 13 /tmp: What's new, and what to do if you don't like it

(lowendbox.com)
150 points shaunpud | 1 comments | 29 Aug 25 02:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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nrdvana ◴[29 Aug 25 04:29 UTC] No.45060203[source]▶
The third mitigating feature the article forgot to mention is that tmpfs can get paged out to the swap partition. If you drop a large file there and forget it, it will all end up in the swap partition if applications are demanding more memory.
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guappa ◴[29 Aug 25 07:57 UTC] No.45061403[source]▶
Fedora did this long before debian. I remember doing wget of an .iso file on /tmp and my entire wayland session being killed by the OOM killer.

I still think it's a terrible idea.

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nolist_policy ◴[29 Aug 25 08:06 UTC] No.45061462[source]▶
Use `/var/tmp` of you want a disk backed tmp.
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1718627440 ◴[29 Aug 25 09:19 UTC] No.45061925[source]▶
I thought /var/tmp is for applications while /tmp is for the user.
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1. throw0101c ◴[29 Aug 25 12:04 UTC] No.45062943[source]▶
> I thought /var/tmp is for applications while /tmp is for the user.

/tmp is for stuff that is 'absolutely' temporary, in that on many/most systems it is nuked between reboots. /var/tmp is 'relatively' temporary in that applications can put stuff there that they're working on, but if there is a crash, the contents are not deleted and can be recovered across reboots.