[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] IMPORTANT: issues with our filesystem check scripts

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

A recent thread in debian-user by someone that had massive data loss on an
EeePC and was blaming the initscripts for it caught my attention, and I did
a quick check.

I found the following problems that I feel we really should address.  Please
correct me if I am wrong:

1. We do not honour /forcefsck properly.  IMHO, it doesn't matter if we're
on battery, or if the moon is blue.  If /forcefsck exists, it should take
precedence (including over /fastboot) and we should do the forced fsck on
every filesystem, rootfs included.

2. We skip the rootfs check while on battery.  We really should not.  If
even one single user gets a worse data loss than what he should have,
because we skipped that fsck, it is already too steep a price to pay.

If someone has a big / in a laptop and fsck drains his battery dry or frags
his patience, it is his price to pay for doing something stupid (a big
rootfs).  I believe we should never optimize for that kind of crap over data
safety.

Now, the really nice fix would be to teach fsck a flag to only check dirty
filesystems, skipping the "too old", and "mounted too many times" conditions
on filesystems that have that kind of stuff (like ext3, ext4), and use THAT
while on battery.

Because dirty filesystems must ALWAYS be checked if you're going to mount
them.  Any other choice is an increased chance of making a data loss
condition worse, and that's not acceptable IMHO.


So, I vote that we either remove the on_ac_power checks completely, or make
them configurable (default disabled), while fsck is not enhanced to the
point that it is safe to have such a test.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh