Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>]

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On Mon, 25 Jul 2005, Seth Alan Woolley wrote:
> Actually, it's not for ext2 (it's safe there), it's for other
> filesystems.  There's no "vote" issue, as SOFTFIX=yes should be default
> for now until we can reimplement the crappy fsck command.
>
> It's apparent from other replies (I'll just comment here since I don't
> feel like starting a new email) there's some confusion on what fsck
> does... it just passes checks and unrecognized arguments onto
> filesystem-specific checkers "in a particular order" depending on what's
> in fstab.  The problem is that filesystem-specific checkers are doing a
> really bad job of using consistent switches.  So while the fsck manual
> says -a is dangerous for some, everybody uses it anyways since ext2 maps
> it to -n.
>
> I just think we need a lot more intelligent fs checking on startup
> because if an error happens bad stuff happens.  I'd almost suggest we
> spawn fsck checking off onto another unused terminal with an open tty
> and use IPC (perhaps a file semaphore) to let init know it's done (and
> deallocate the vc when it's done).
>
> That way the fscks can never claim there's no terminal open (which is
> causing most of the headache), plus you can do a bit more verbosity with
> it since it's outputting to another terminal (perhaps 11 like how 12 is
> often the logger).  I'm also thinking perhaps we can add another field
> to fstab to let the system know which filesystems are required for
> continued booting.  Everybody hates it when a fs fails and it's not
> really needed to boot but it croaks the whole boot process.
>
> Anything to make boot more graceful/intelligent is better, I think, as
> there's been a historical lack of creativity wth the fsck process in
> unix/linux as far as I'm aware, and it really needs some help, at least
> the linux fsck.

I'm all for cleaning up our mountall.sh script to work more
specifically with different filesystems. However, I am strongly
against changing the fstab format.

- -sandalle

- --
Eric Sandall                     |  Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric AT sandall.us                  |  http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/          |  SysAdmin @ Inst. Shock Physics @ WSU
http://counter.li.org/  #196285  |  http://www.shock.wsu.edu/
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