Re: Provide an option to specify the tmpfs size of the container

[Robert Smith]

Hi Ludo,

On Mon Dec 14, 2020 at 10:56 AM Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> luhux <luhux@outlook.com> skribis:
> 
> > I am using guix environment --container to containerize my programming 
> > environment and runtime environment, but I found that the container / 
> > created by this command uses tmpfs and cannot be resized.
> >
> > When a file in the container outputs a lot of logs to the tmpfs of the 
> > container, the memory usage of the host will be very high (this is usually 
> > something I did not expect)
> >
> > So can provide an option to specify the size of tmpfs?
> 
> Sure, why not.  Would you like to give it a try?

This feature caught my interest and I wanted to investigate a bit :)
tmpfs defaults to half of the available RAM, with the 'size=' option to
the mount command we can increase this limit but I believe that the
upper bound is the sum of the available RAM + swap space. Would it be
worthwhile to allow for the container filesystem to be stored in a
non-temporary filesystem, for example allowing the user to specify the
parent directory of the container root? This would let the container fs
grow as large as the computer storage allows.

-Robert