Root partition read-only

[Derek Broughton]

Willy Hamra wrote:

> 2009/4/16 Derek Broughton <derek at pointerstop.ca>:
>> Antonio Augusto (Mancha) wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 12:52, Derek Broughton <derek at pointerstop.ca>
>>> wrote:
>>
>>>> Probably not "corrupted", but you're not going through a proper
>>>> shutdown. If a filesystem doesn't get properly dismounted, it's marked
>>>> "dirty" and JFS will want to do an fsck on start-up.
>>>
>>> Thats the problem... For what i remember i shut the computer properly,
>>> without any issues what so ever... :/
>>
>> You need to look back at the logs for the time you did the shutdown - but
>> I'd pretty much guarantee that something went wrong in the shutdown
>> process.
> 
> but this is not the real issue. he might have powered off his lappie
> with no proper shutdown, still, that is no solution to just give him a
> read-only root partition. fsck should run, even when on battery power,

I agree, in principle (and really don't understand how anybody felt that not
fscking if on battery power was a good thing - you can't just be mounting
potentially bad filesystems, even read-only).

> or at the very least prompt him to choose between running it, booting
> with an ro root parition, or powering back off till he plugs the
> lappie into power and can run fsck.

It's a conflict between the design of the boot process and the JFS
filesystem package - deciding _when_ to run fsck is part of the boot
process, but refusing to mount r/w _unless_ you get an fsck is part of JFS,
and ideally one or the other or both would be fixed.  However, I've never
filed a bug report because once I understood the process it became trivial
to avoid the condition ever happening.  Probably that makes me a bad
person: at least if I had filed a report somebody like Antonio would have
been able to find the report and see how to avoid the problem too :-)

However, I still think _how_ his filesystem came to be improperly dismounted
is very much the "real issue".  Especially since he thinks it was a normal
shutdown.
-- 
derek