On Saturday 16 February 2008 03:38:11 pm Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Saturday 2008-02-16 at 13:14 -0700, Carlos F. Lange wrote:
Anyone else getting annoyed by the periodic check forced in ext3 partitions?
I started using ext3 in my large /home partitions, as recommended by openSUSE (still using Reiser for my smaller RAID1 root partition, because of this strange bug: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=350992 ) and today I passed again the 60 days limit without checking ext3 and I had to wait 10 minutes for the 200GB partition to be checked.
It is bad enough that we don't get any decent feedback in the splash screen ( https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=344271 ), which I can imagine is unsettling to many new users, who will have no clue about what is happening.
What I really question is if these lengthy checks are really needed.
Yes, they are needed. Unfortunately.
What could be reported as a bug is the no feedback situation with the splash screen. I always disable the splash screen and boot in verbose mode.
My Reiser partition was cleared with a simple journal check (isn't that what journaling systems are about?).
Yes... but it happens that that fast check doesn't catch all problems. Sometimes user complain of "funny" things happening on their reiserfs partition; when they force a reiserfsck they do discover they had undetected problems.
Add to that the fact that hard disks are becoming bigger and these forced check times can mean one might need to wait 20 minutes or 1/2 hour to get access to the machine again? Obviously this will happen when you have to leave in 10 minutes and you are just about to print out that vital document and your foot hits the reset switch...
Perhaps a method could be devised to warn in advance that a disk check is getting near, and then do it at your convenience. Or when the time comes to have the possibility of saying "tomorrow, please".
I read somewhere that the kernel people had a power failure, and it forced an fsck of their filesystem, with all those things they have. It took hours, if I remember correctly. The comment was that a recovery from backup would have been faster.
-- Cheers, Carlos E. R.
Can the check be ran manually like you can with reiser? That way instead of doing it a boot every 60 days it can be ran while the system is idle.