I completely like the LVM idea, as I was saying on IRC a bit ago, that would really be an elegant system. LVM up root, and whatever other chosen disks, and safely check that in the background (possibly a nice notification icon even?) and pop up a ping box when an error is found (the level of error it goes into rigorous fsck mode being user configurable, but shipping with a default of some sort, tbd later) this would REALLY cut down on issues...
The only discrepancy here is what happens when the disk is corrupted to a high degree and we try to boot it? Fairly simple yet also complex response to that. It would have to work similar to bulletproof X... though obviously on a lower level. We could flag to a safe location to fsck on boot. Or even have a special grub entry that fscks automatically, that would be interesting. The first being more elegant, though rather hard... it would require us to have a "safe-zone" to store this sort of small information. And we have no idea what part of the FS/Disk could be bad. Possibly a combination of the two might be in order. Honestly it is a tad complex but it is REALLY a cool idea. We should write up a formal spec and see where it goes, still needs some development, but it's really promising In my opinion. John Dong wrote: > A partial check doesn't make sense with the current fsck tools AFAIK. We > should do a full filesystem check if anything, and if a user decides to abort > it, it's his choice. > > There should be a graphical or otherwise easily accessible way of re-touching > the /forcefsck flag so that users can choose which bootup to do a check on. > Another "idea" is on LVM-capable systems to take a snapshot of important > filesystems while they are unmounted or read-only then fsck the snapshot > device as a background task. If any serious errors are detected in the > snapshot, then schedule an uncancelable boot scan. > > I agree with everyone who says that the current fsck experience is a blemish > to Ubuntu's general user-friendliness, and also that we should not be entirely > removing the regular fsck as it catches hardware irregularities and potential > software bugs with ext3. > > > John > > On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 01:25:54PM +0200, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote: > >> Problem is that users will just skip the test, and get tired of "having" >> to skip the test each time. Perhaps an alternative would be to check >> only a part of the filesystem (e.g. randomly choosen) each time, but I >> don't know enough about filesystem (even though I should :) ) to say >> it's impossible or feasible. >> >> Vincenzo >> -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
