Re: 0-nlink inodes can lead to dirty filesystems being marked "clean"

Olaf Titz (olaf@bigred.inka.de)
Sat, 27 Jun 1998 11:18:39 +0200


> 2. When a filesystem is remounted read-only, it is *not* marked
> clean if it has in-use, 0-nlink inodes. If a following "umount"
> or "remount" finds no such inodes, *then* the filesystem can be
> marked clean.

No. When a file system is mounted R/O, the expectation is that _no_
write access occurs on it (like with a hardware R/O device). After you
have remounted it R/O, a subsequent umount may not write to the
device. Thus you can't mark it clean afterwards. (I don't know if
anything depends on this behavior, but I think this is a common
assumption which should not be broken.)

Plus, this is not nice UI-wise: nobody expects the system to fsck
after a shutdown which looks completely OK. (People who don't know
from experience how robust ext2fs really is might go into panic :-)

olaf

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