/dev/shm

Settings

Alter /etc/fstab's entry for /dev/shm and apply settings with mount -a, or reboot:

none   /dev/shm        tmpfs   defaults,size=768M,noexec,nodev,nosuid        0       0

size

Accepts 'k', 'm' or 'g' and their capitalized versions as units. The size parameter also accepts a suffix % to limit this tmpfs instance to that percentage of your physical RAM. The default is 50%.

noexec,nodev,nosuid

Universal options for most file-systems affecting permissions. See: man mount

Note: Arch Linux now uses systemd which handles mounting the /dev/shm filesystem automatically. Therefore, this entry into the fstab is no longer necessary.

See also

• See Wikipedia:Shared memory for background.