From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG  Wed Aug 31 18:47:21 2005
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To: "Darren Pilgrim" <dmp@bitfreak.org>
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 30 Aug 2005 23:07:16 PDT."
	<002101c5adf2$3db52620$642a15ac@SMILEY> 
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2005 11:47:20 -0700
From: "Kevin Oberman" <oberman@es.net>
Message-Id: <20050831184720.5505A5D07@ptavv.es.net>
Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, 'Steven Hartland' <killing@multiplay.co.uk>,
	"'Julian H. Stacey'" <jhs@flat.berklix.net>
Subject: Re: Sysinstall automatic filesystem size generation. 
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> From: "Darren Pilgrim" <dmp@bitfreak.org>
> Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 23:07:16 -0700
> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
> 
> From: Julian H. Stacey
> > "Steven Hartland" wrote:
> > > data. In addition to that I dont have to sit though 1 hour worth of 
> > > offline checks when it crashes for what ever reason which I do on
> our 
> > > FreeBSD boxes.
> > 
> > [Apologies if I missed something, coming in late on thread, but ...]
> > 
> > FreeBSD-4 does fsck on dirty filesystems before going multi 
> > user: You wait.
> > FreeBSD-5.* & 6.0-BETA3 : fsck runs in background after boot: 
> > No waiting.
> 
> A dirty volume can cause some fairly severe problems if it's used before
> the background fsck completes repairs.  I'd rather delay restart than
> face even more damage when something else dies because the volume was
> mounted dirty.

This should NOT be the case if you have softupdates enabled for a
partition. And fsck should not background if the partition does not have
soft updates enabled.

If the volume with soft updates is mounted 'dirty', it should have NO
implications other then not having all of the free space on the disk
available until the fsck completes. Read-write access should always be
safe and no data should be effected by the fsck.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman@es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634