[kde-solaris] ... people are running KDE3 on systems with as little as 64MB for daily use.

[Roman Maeder]

> > Additionally, the '/tmp' file system (by
> > default) is allocated from the space of available memory.
> 
> This is what i am not sure about. My understanding is that, on 
> Solaris, if /tmp is not mounted on its separate disk partition, the 
> kernel will create a TMPFS partition on /tmp when mounting swap, at 
> boot time, and mount swap on it -- if this is not true, and i am 
> being bogus, please say so. :-)

if you have a line like

swap	-	/tmp            tmpfs   -       yes     -

in your /etc/vfstab, it will use swap for /tmp. This is in
/etc/init.d/buildmnttab.  You can also tell by doing a "df /tmp";
this will tell you where it's mounted from. Additionally it mounts swap
on /var/run.

> With this configuration, this 
> explains why, when rebooting Solaris, the files in /tmp are gone, and 
> /tmp is re-created.

Solaris (8) always erases /tmp on boot, whether on disk or swap space.
This is in /etc/init.d/RMTMPFILES

I find the swapping behaviour of Solaris (8) quite reasonable. At the
moment I have, on an old UltraSPARC 2, 768MB of RAM; total virtual
address space used is 488MB (KDE plus StarOffice), together with 140MB
in /tmp this still leaves me some RAM. Indeed the system never even
touched the swap partitions since the last boot. You can tell by looking
at "swap -l"

swapfile             dev  swaplo blocks   free
/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s1   32,9      16 2068400 2068400
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1   32,1      16 2068400 2068400

the last column will permanently go down, if it ever pages stuff to disk.
If you have a separate partition for /tmp, get rid of it and assign all
to swap, and mount it on /tmp; This makes better use of disk space and
speeds up everything (you may have to use TMPDIR=/tmp for some programs
that by default use /var/tmp).

Roman Maeder