Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Seth Alan Woolley <seth AT positivism.org>]

On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 10:28:02AM -0700, Eric Sandall wrote:
> 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.

It could simply be something added to the 'options' field, or we can add 
a separate file /etc/sysconfig/mount file with some unixish format.  We 
don't need to really add a field.

-- 
Seth Alan Woolley [seth at positivism.org], SPAM/UCE is unauthorized
Quality Assurance Team Leader & Security Team: Source Mage GNU/linux
Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic http://www.sourcemage.org
Secretary Pacific Green Party of Oregon http://www.pacificgreens.org
Key id FDCEE733 = 5302 B414 64C4 6112 3454  E082 99F0 69DC FDCE E733

Attachment: pgpQXtPrbUa3b.pgp
Description: PGP signature