From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Jan 4 20:40:27 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id UAA00636 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 4 Jan 1998 20:40:27 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from rover.village.org (rover.village.org [204.144.255.49]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id UAA00629 for ; Sun, 4 Jan 1998 20:40:18 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from imp@village.org) Received: from harmony [10.0.0.6] by rover.village.org with esmtp (Exim 1.71 #1) id 0xp4Ki-0000HA-00; Sun, 4 Jan 1998 21:40:12 -0700 Received: from harmony.village.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by harmony.village.org (8.8.8/8.8.3) with ESMTP id VAA25521 for ; Sun, 4 Jan 1998 21:40:20 -0700 (MST) Message-Id: <199801050440.VAA25521@harmony.village.org> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Musing on boot Date: Sun, 04 Jan 1998 21:40:19 -0700 From: Warner Losh Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk I've hacked my rc files so that I always fsck on boot. This worked out fairly well until recently. Recently, I added about 6G of space across several partitions and disks. Now the system takes forever to boot. I had thought about unhacking the fsck, but then I realized that it would take forever to boot when I've crashed. So, being the safety conscious impatient engineer that I am, I thought about implementing the following. I thought I'd bounce it off hackers first to see what people think. The idea is to have a list of file systems that *MUST* be present for the system to come up. These files systems are fsck'd and mounted synchronously. All the rest of the file systems have a fsck kicked off in the background, and a mount done when that fsck happens to finish. This is horrible for home directories, but great for the OpenBSD sources, FreeBSD source, NetBSD sources, /usr/obj, build trees, gcc/egcs expermental crap, etc that is scattered over much of the new disk space. This would allow me to get back up quickly, while allowing stuff to "drift" into the system as it is available. I thought I'd bounce it off hackers. It seems like such a simple idea that something must be wrong with it. Comments? Warner P.S. Code to follow if there appears to be interest...