Comment 16 for bug 59293

Revision history for this message
Jason Spiro (jasonspiro) wrote :

== Dosfstools and reading the dirty flag ==

A few changes[1] to dosfstools, made just before 3.0.14 was released, mean that dosfstools can now read a FAT partition's boot sector's dirty flag.

== Do all three major OSes set the dirty flag? ==

Windows versions since at least[2] Windows 2000 set the dirty flag in a FAT partition's boot sector when needed. Recent[2] released versions of the Linux kernel do too.

What do recent versions of Mac OS X do? How do you know?

== My proposal ==

If we discover that all three major OSes can set the dirty flag when needed, then:

A) I think someone should email the dosfstools maintainer and ask if he could please subscribe to this bug.
B) I suggest that dosfsck should not check a clean filesystem unless someone passes a "force" command-line parameter.

^ [1]. http://daniel-baumann.ch/gitweb/?p=software/dosfstools.git;a=shortlog
^ [2]. http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=b88a105802e9aeb6e234e8106659f5d1271081bb