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the purpose of /dev/shm

Greetings all.

I'm running suse 9.1 (x86_64) - I'm a debian guy really - anyways, I've noticed that a tmpfs is mounted @ /dev/shm .
My question is: why is a tmpfs necessary for an average desktop user?
All there seems to be stored there are links to other partitions that suse arbitrarily mounts at boot time (not part of my partition scheme for suse9.1-x86_64).
It uses 500 megs of ram to do this, and seems a rather poor use for half my ram!
Any comments would be appreciated.

Crow.

Quote:

The /dev/shm mount point for tmpfs is included to allow enabling POSIX shared memory. Your kernel must have the required support built into it for this to work -- more about this in the next section. Please note that currently very little software actually uses POSIX shared memory. Therefore you can consider the /dev/shm mount point optional. For more information, see Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt in the kernel source tree.

this is from the LFS 5.0 book..........IF you don't need/use POSIX,
then edit your /etc/fstab so it does not load........