/dev/shm question

[linkinpark342]

Hey all,
just a quick question. How much space does /dev/shm need. I looked on google and just found very vague descriptions of what it was used for. Actually the best answer someone could give would be some kind of longer explanation on why exactly we need it. my current one runs on about 1 GB and i'm thinking that may be a bit extraneous...

Thanks

 

[n0cmonkey]

All of /dev takes less than a MB on a couple of bigger systems I'm on.

 

[linkinpark342]

Ah... i think i'm going to be putting a space limiter on that then

 

[bersl2]

It is suggested that /dev/shm be mounted as a tmpfs RAM filesystem. Of course, I'm not even sure how often that namespace gets used anymore, if at all.

 

[Nothinman]

It's used by anything that uses POSIX shared memory on Linux, which admittadly is pretty rare these days. It's tmpfs (not ramfs) which means it can be paged out so there's no reason to worry about the size of it. The only thing I can think of that uses it on my system is the Debian networking tools, they store the interface state there.

 

[yuchai]

I believe the ATI Proprietary Graphics Driver also requires it.

 

[cker]

I occasionally work with some computation programs (chemistry stuff, et c) that use POSIX shared memory. They require various amounts of it.

VMWare also benefits from boosting your shared memory allocation space.