On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 13:53 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Monday 03 April 2006 13:40, Craig White wrote: > >On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 13:19 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > >> On Monday 03 April 2006 12:19, Sjoerd Mullender wrote: > >> >Sjoerd Mullender wrote: > >> >> Gene Heskett wrote: > >> >>> I was under the impression (and no idea where I heard/read that > >> >>> now) that any partitions marked 0 0 on the end of the fstab line > >> >>> were mounted in 'single' mode. Is this not the case? I haven't > >> >>> used single with this FC2 install ever, no need to so far, so I > >> >>> don't know, but I'll find out the next time I reboot to it. > >> >> > >> >> Those numbers are the dump frequency and dump pass number, i.e. > >> >> unused by nearly everyone nowadays. They were there way back > >> >> (nearly 30 years ago) when they were actually used, but since > >> >> hardly anybody uses dump/restore anymore to make backups, those > >> >> fields are not used anymore. See the descriptions of fs_freq and > >> >> fs_passno in the manual page for fstab(5). > >> >> > >> >> (If you look at the manual for dump (if you have it installed), > >> >> you can see that dump uses dump levels. A dump at level n will > >> >> dump everything that changed since the last level m (m <= n) > >> >> dump. The pass number specifies which partitions can be dumped > >> >> at the same time, first all partitions with pass number 0, then > >> >> all with pass number 1, etc.) > >> > > >> >Oops. The level is for fsck (file system check), not dump. It's > >> > been a while. > >> > >> I was thinking I'd recalled it in that context. Its not well > >> clarified in the manpages IMP. > > > >---- > >man fstab... > > > >The fifth field, (fs_freq), is used for these filesystems by the > > dump(8) command to determine which filesystems need to be dumped. If > > the fifth field is not present, a value of zero is returned and > > dump will assume that the filesystem does not need to be dumped. > > > >The sixth field, (fs_passno), is used by the fsck(8) program to > >determine the order in which filesystem checks are done at reboot > > time. The root filesystem should be specified with a > > fs_passno of 1, and other filesystems should have a fs_passno of 2. > > Filesystems within a drive will be checked sequentially, but > > filesystems on different drives will be checked at the same time to > > utilize parallelism available in the hardware. If the sixth field > > is not present or zero, a value of zero is returned and fsck will > > assume that the filesystem does not need to be checked. > > > >Seems clear enough but you can write a patch for the man page if you > > can explain it better. > > > >Craig > > Humm, its been several years since I looked at that, and it appears > someone has beat me to it, thats plenty clear enough to me now. ---- evidently almost 7 years (2 kernels ago) the date of the man page in the footer states... Linux 2.2 15 June 1999 FSTAB(5) Craig
