fsck on boot is major usability issue

[Jonathan Musther]

To try to answer the question of whether we could simply disable the
periodic fsck, I decided to ask Mingming Cao, one of the developers
who has worked on ext3 and later, ext4.  I just got the following:

"Periodically fsck ext3 is still needed, even if ext3 is a journalled fs.
kernel code vm/fs could be buggy, or disks IO errors, which cause
filesystem metadata corrupted silently, this can't be detected by simply
replaying the journal log.

Well how often should ext3 do the sanity check is really depend on the
customer's priority, whether they would like to trade some of the boot
up time with more confident of the fs's healthy.  It's probably a good
idea to warning the user that the scheduled fsck is coming and let user
to decide whether they want to do it or delaying it."

That answers it for me.

On Dec 21, 2007 9:31 AM, Phillip Susi <psusi at cfl.rr.com> wrote:

>
> I still say we should just disable the checks entirely.  No other
> filesystem still does this nonsense.  It's just a holdover from ext2,
> which had it as a leftover from ext, which had it out of convention from
> minix, which did it as purely pedantic ( or did it actually perform some
> maintenance then that needed done periodically?  I can't remember ).
>
> On the other hand, your solution looks like a great improvement.
>
>


-- 
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