Automatic fsck

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 02:59:22PM +0100, Alexander Jones wrote:
> 2008/8/12 Lars Wirzenius <lars at ubuntu.com>:
> > A way to avoid that would be to set up systems with LVM, and use an LVM
> > snapshot volume for running fsck. This would give fsck a frozen snapshot
> > of the system, and should work better. However, it requires some free
> > space to be used, and I haven't actually tried it yet. Reserving some
> > disk space just for this probably isn't going to be all that popular,
> > either. However, for systems on which it would be acceptable, it might
> > be worthwhile to investigate this.
> 
> And then what happens when it fails the check? Sounds pretty messy to me.

Indeed.  The best we could do in a scenario like this would be to flag the
filesystem dirty so that it gets checked the next time it's possible.

> I say we look into fixing e2fsck to do online consistency checking
> without borking over changing filesystem contents. Don't other OS/FS
> combos do this well?

This requires the cooperation of the kernel, and I don't think this exists
in ext3.

-- 
 - mdz