ArchLinux - Temporarily resize /tmp partition

Context#

tmpfs is a temporary file system that resides in memory and/or swap partition(s).

tmpfs is commonly used for /tmp. By default, a tmpfs has its maximum size set to half the total of RAM. Note that the actual memory/swap consumption depends on how much you fill it up, as tmpfs partitions do not consume any memory until it is actually needed.

Problem example: You want to build an Android development lab in a VM. You set VM RAM to 2GB. So by default, /tmp size will be 1GB. You begin to install Android Studio but an error occured, telling you that there is not enough space on the disk. That's because /tmp is too small to contain all temporary downloads of Android Studio during the install process.

Fix#

For a problem like the prvious example, we don't want to do a permanent change as that's just a punctual need. So to fix the problem we'll temporarily increase the size of /tmp. It is posible because in our example the VM has 2GB RAM + 4GB SWAP, so we can increase a tmpfs partition up to 6GB.

Before the resizing:

$ df /tmp                                           
Filesystem     1K-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs            1048576    84   1048492   1% /tmp

Temporary resize:

mount -o remount,size=4G,noatime /tmp

After the resizing:

$ df /tmp
Filesystem     1K-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs            4194304    80   4194224   1% /tmp