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Re: making bootup fsck more user-friendly



On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 10:51:06AM +0200, David wrote:
 
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 6:54 PM, Douglas A. Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 11:25:23AM +0200, David wrote:
> [...]
> >
> > Sort answer, read the disk-related HOWTOs and try switching to JFS.
> >
> 
> Unfortunately, experimenting with other filesystems will have to wait
> until I have a spare drive. I don't know of a way to convert to other
> filesystems on the fly :-) Also, the need to defer fsck seems like a
> poor reason to go through the trouble of switching my home PC's
> filesystem :-)
> 

There are several hard-disk HOWTOs in the doc-linux-howto packages (pick
your format).  Its not that hard if you have a spare partition or just
good backups.  Its especially easy if you're using LVM.  Without LVM I
admit it can be a bit of a shell-game but it only takes a few minutes
once you map it out. 

Unless you're willing to rewrite fsck to get a defer mode, switching to
a faster fs is a valid option.  

 
> I disagree here. You can easily use up 300 MB on / by installing a few
> large packages from Debian. Or are you saying that / should contain
> almost nothing, and that /usr, /var/, etc should all be on separate
> partitions?

Yes, when one says that / is 300MB, it means that /usr, /var, and /home
are separate.  Etch won't fit on 512MB complete yet alone having any
special packages installed.

> 
> Maybe if your system is extremely critical you would need to have / this way.
> 
> Personally, I would like to be able to take a 500 GB drive, and put
> the whole filesystem on / (including /boot, and a swap file) in my
> home PC, and not be forced to wait for bootup fsck to scan the entire
> drive every X days/boot before I can use it. I don't mind if it takes
> an hour to scan, as long as that hour is not when I need to be
> actively using the PC (after I tell the machine to shut down is a good
> time).

I would call my home computer extremely critical.  I don't want some
bug corrupting /usr or /var and making it so that I can't boot to fix
it.  With / separate and small, the chances of it getting corrupted are
rather small.

Doug.


> 
> Also, that hour-long scan needs to be cleanly interruptible. Ctrl+C or
> ESC needs to do the right thing.
> 
> David.
> 
> 
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