On systems with large amounts of RAM allocating 10% for /run is also undesirable. My latest server has 48G of RAM (not really big by server standards) and I don't want a runaway process writing to /run to consume 4.8G of RAM before it is stopped.
/dev has no size specified in /usr/share/initramfs-tools/init so it gets half of RAM as the default tmpfs size. It's not that uncommon for a script to write to a file under /dev thinking it's writing to a device (a typo in /dev/ null when running as root is a common example). I would prefer to mitigate the damage that such accidents can cause by reducing the size of /dev. I can't imagine anyone needing more than a few dozen megs for /dev anyway. Also the number of inodes is set to half the number of pages. On a system with 48G of RAM that means 6182147, which is well in excess of anything you need in /dev or /run. Presumably some kernel memory is taken for the inodes or something, otherwise it would default to 2^32 or something. So reducing the number to something reasonable seems sensible. I've experimented with setting both /dev and /run to 200M and 4096 inodes and it seems fine. But ideally it would be best to allow the sysadmin to easily tune these things without editing /usr/share/initramfs-tools/init. Maybe make /usr/share/ initramfs-tools/init a template that is run through sed to generate the actual paramaters used when booting from a config file under /etc/initramfs-tools. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
