| 2009-08-18 00:17:53 |
Benjamin Mako Hill |
description |
Today, for the second time, when booting my computer (a Dell Laptop), mounted my filesystem as readonly (jfs for the matters).
The first time this happened was during aprils fool, when I couldn't get it to mount the filesystem correctly for some time (rebooted the system 5 or 6 times before it actually mounted it as r/w).
Today it happened again.
The only thing in common that i see is that, both times i was running on batteries. And when connected the power the problem got away. I can't see to find ways to reproduce it.
But I think it might be related to the fact the fsck is not ran if the system is on batteries. So, it might be that the fs gets corrupted by some reason, and on reboot its not clean, and hence mount can't remount it r/w (thou I haven't seen any message indicating this).
If any additional info needed please tell me. |
If a JFS FS is ever unmounted unclearly, the filesystem needs to be checked. If the FS is mounted without a fsck, the FS will be read only. The effect is that if an install with a JFS root FS ever crashes, looses power, or otherwise shuts down uncleanly and the system is then booted up without AC power, the system will silently and without warning mount the root FS read only and fail to start a variety of applications, most notably GDM. If a user does not know how to fsck their root by hand, the system will become unusable until the system is booted with AC power present.
A fsck on JFS takes well under a minute to run so concerns about battery power are less important than they might be in ext3. I see no reason to have the checkroot.sh script always run the fsck if the system is JFS. This will address fix this issue for JFS laptop users.
To reproduce the bug: (1) unmount JFS root FS uncleanly; (2) boot system without AC power. |
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