Bug#1012046: gnome-terminal-server writes on disk data when a program output data on term

[Egmont Koblinger]

Hi,

You don't need to worry about leaking confidential data. VTE stores the
scrollback data in encrypted files, and erases the encryption key from
memory as soon as the given terminal tab is closed. That is, if support for
encryption is compiled in (it is in Debian), which you can double check by
looking for "+GNUTLS" in gnome-terminal's About dialog, or in the output of
gnome-terminal --version.

Should you be interested in juicy technical details, see:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664611
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=738601
and the comments at the top of vtestream-file.h, a file which you have
already found and looked at.

> It uses deleted files in /tmp instead of no files or files in RAM in /run.
> [...] For me everything should be in RAM as xterm does.

VTE supports infinite scrollback, due to popular demand. Consuming
arbitrarily large amount of RAM, potentially even more than the physical
amount you have, plays very badly with the kernel's swapping and OOM
killer, it's basically unviable as opposed to storing it on disk which
works fine. That's the reason (in a nutshell) behind this solution.

cheers,
egmont
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