Other Distros (NOT A FLAMEWAR TOPIC!!)

[Matthew R. Dempsky]

On Sun, Apr 09, 2006 at 01:49:32AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> fsck'ing every x mounts just in case ext3-style feels wrong to me. If 
> there's a possibility of inode corruption I'd say there's serious 
> problems with that file system and an fsck is unlikely to find and 
> fix everything.

That behavior is configurable.  See the -c and -i options in tune2fs(8).

However, the same man page also warns the following:

        You should strongly consider the consequences of disabling 
        mount-count-dependent checking entirely.  Bad disk drives, 
        cables, memory, and kernel bugs could all corrupt a filesystem 
        without marking the filesystem dirty or in error.  If you are 
        using journaling on your filesystem, your filesystem will 
        *never* be marked dirty, so it will not normally be checked.  A 
        filesystem error detected by the kernel will still force an fsck 
        on the next reboot, but it may already be too late to prevent 
        data loss at that point.

That warning would seem applicable to any filesystem, including Reiser.