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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!caen!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!haven.umd.edu!umd5.umd.edu!elea.umd.edu!mark From: mark@elea.umd.edu (Mark Sienkiewicz) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: what is fs_clean for? Date: 1 Oct 1993 17:10:28 GMT Organization: Zeno, IPST, University of Maryland Lines: 32 Message-ID: <28hoa4$ccg@umd5.umd.edu> References: <28fmis$12b9@acsc.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: elea.umd.edu In article <28fmis$12b9@acsc.com>, Jerry Chen <jerry@acsc.com> wrote: >During the mount time, what should be done if the file system is not clean? >Should the mount request be rejected or should the mount succeed? Thanks >for the answer. There are two answers to this: WRONG: Reject the mount of filesystems that are not clean. RIGHT: Mount it anyway. You may detect a bit of bias in my statements. :) The argument for rejecting it is that you don't know that the filesystem is clean - by mounting it, you can make it worse. Also, you might have a detrimental effect on the rest of the system. The argument for allowing the mount is that the filesystem probably is not in very bad shape. You can *safely* run for *months* with blocks missing from the free list or unreferenced inodes allocated. So I don't want my entire system failing (e.g. can't mount /usr) because I lost a temporary file. I also don't like systems that say "I won't do what you told me to do because somebody programmed me to be smarter than you". Computers that say that are lying. Maybe *I* know that the damage is not bad enough to prevent me from doing what I want to do. Ideally, one of these two behaviours could be selected by an option in the config file. e.g. options NO_MOUNT_DIRTY # behaviour I thought was wrong # but some people might like