Hi, On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 12:41, Mike Burger wrote: > Most of the journaling filesystems, other than ext3, don't require fsck in > the event of an improper shutdown, which speeds up the boot process in > such a case. Ext3 doesn't require fsck, either. It just does a short journal replay, but it can do that either in kernel space or in user space. The main reason why you *want* to do a fsck at boot time is not actually to do a fs recovery; it's to check the fs error state flags in case there are problems (due to software or hardware errors) that normal recovery can't deal with, and that require a full fsck. The way it works is that if the running ext3 detects a serious problem on disk, it can abort the fs, turn it readonly, and set a flag in the journal indicating why the fs was aborted. Then on reboot, fsck sees the flag and forces a full fs check. If you're sure you never have bad hardware --- you'll never get a bad sector, etc --- then you can disable the fsck with ext3 and you'll never notice anything, because the kernel will just do the recovery itself at mount time. --Stephen
