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.
== 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 git.kernel. org/cgit/ linux/kernel/ git/torvalds/ linux.git/ commit/ ?id=b88a105802e 9aeb6e234e81066 59f5d1271081bb
^ [2]. http://