On Fri, 28 Dec 2012 02:20:20 +0900
OGAWA Hirofumi <hirofumi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There is no documented methods to mark FAT as dirty. Unofficially MS
started to use reserved Byte in boot sector for this purpose,
at least since Win 2000. With Win 7 user is warned if fs is dirty
and asked to clean it.
Different versions of Win, handle it in different ways,
but always have same meaning:
- Win 2000 and XP, set it on write operations and
remove it after operation was finnished
- Win 7, set dirty flag on first write and remove it on umount.
We will do it as fallow:
- set dirty flag on mount. If fs was initially dirty, warn user,
remember it and do not do any changes to boot sector.
- clean it on umount. If fs was initially dirty, leave it dirty.
- do not do any thing if fs mounted read-only.
- TODO: leave fs dirty if we found some error after mount.
The changelog doesn't describe why we're making this change. Nor does
it describe the user-visible effects of this change.
AFAICT the effect is to issue a warning at mount-time to tell the
user that the fs wasn't cleanly unmounted and that the user should fsck
the volume, correct?
If so, why is this considered a desirable feature? (I can guess, but
would prefer to hear it spelled out by the experts, please).