Is the mount option needed for backwards compat? Any system that creates that many files, should be large file aware, hopefully? Maybe it comes down to many files being created (and deleted) during the lifetime of the tmpfs mount, i.e usage time, not size, without any counter reset.<p>A system that uses "our identifier space is approximately infinite" can be fragile in a surprising way. A system that uses "our identifier space is proportional to the physical size of the medium" is more humanly predictable in its limitations.