Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:03:10 +0100 From: Chris Rees <utisoft@googlemail.com> To: FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>, Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>, invalid.pointer@gmail.com Subject: Re: Question about forcing fsck at boottime Message-ID: <b79ecaef0903310403l33df4eb2q16223504bdb8ff98@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <49D1F0BA.7050209@gmail.com> References: <49D1B297.8060307@gmail.com> <20090331080137.31122795@gluon.draftnet> <49D1F0BA.7050209@gmail.com>
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2009/3/31 manish jain <invalid.pointer@gmail.com>: > BTW, a lot of people who posted replies thought I was not aware that a preen > is always executed at startup. When I said I wanted to force an fsck, I > meant 'fsck -fy'. As for background checks, they are - in my opinion - a > real nightmare. Even though I am just a learner on FreeBSD still, I can > assure anyone, putting background_fsck="NO" into your rc.conf is one of the > best things you can do. > > As for the reason why I want to force fsck is that it has now happened 3 > timed that, after a clean and proper shutdown - with no foreign filesystems > mounted, FreeBSD has complained on system restart (twice on a 5.x > distribution I had briefly used and now once on 7.1) that / was not properly > unmounted. Having bgfsck enabled is like inviting a dragon to dinner when > this happens. > Sorry, but I have to disagree. The filesystem that FreeBSD uses (UFS to some, FFS to others) has a feature known as 'snapshots', something alien to people in the Linux world. What this means, is that one can take a 'snapshot' of a drive's state (somewhat like a versioning tag), and mount, dump, OR fsck it. The point of a background fsck is that the SNAPSHOT is fsck'd, and only if there is a problem (which there usually isn't, due to soft-updates meaning that data are rarely lost on power loss) does fsck require write access to the volume in question. This is also why you can dump a live filesystem in FreeBSD. Just to reiterate something said a thousand times, there is NOTHING WRONG with background fscks, and just because something doesn't work well for GNU/Linux doesn't mean it doesn't work with FreeBSD. There are many differences, after all. Chris -- A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
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