AutoFsck - Technical Review

[Aigars Mahinovs]

2008/8/12 Scott James Remnant <scott at netsplit.com>:
> (Originally posted to the Technical Board, 20th Feburary)
>
> On the train home this evening I was able to perform a detailed
> technical review of Jonathan Musther's AutoFsck specification and
> implementation.
>
> I think that we are all agreed that the forced fsck on boot when you
> have reached an arbitrary number of mounts of the disk is undesirable.
> The work done in Ubuntu 8.04 to output progress within usplash and allow
> it to be skipped is an improvement, but it's not perfect.  Two obvious
> solutions to remove this exist:
>
> (1) run the filesystem check on shutdown when close to the maximum count
>
> (2) get rid of the mount count check altogether
>

There is a way to get (2), but that would require quite a lot of
in-kernel work, that would also be required for
defragmetnation-on-the-run.

The most correct way, IMHO would be to perform both disk checks and
defragmentation in kernel, in the background of a running system
during the drive idle time and just have the user-space control when
that can happen (for power saving purposes or to let user pause
auto-defrag to get more FPS out of their game).

This could reduce the regular filesystem check on bootup to a O(1)
time check of 5-15 seconds, if the bulk of the work over the
filesystem is done over the runtime and remove the need for a regular
defragmentation.

Wouldn't that be a much cleaner solution overall? Just 2¢ from a lurker. :)

-- 
Best regards,
 Aigars Mahinovs mailto:aigarius at debian.org
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