A Debian user has recently discovered that systemd prevents the skipping of fsck while booting:
With init, skipping a scheduled fsck during boot was easy, you just pressed Ctrl+c, it was obvious! Today I was late for an online conference. I got home, turned on my computer, and systemd decided it was time to run fsck on my 1TB hard drive. Ok, I just skip it, right? Well, Ctrl+c does not work, ESC does not work, nothing seems to work. I Googled for an answer on my phone but nothing. So, is there a mysterious set of commands they came up with to skip an fsck or is it yet another flaw?
One user chimed in with a hack to work around the flaw, but it involved specifying an argument on the kernel command line. Another user described this so-called "fix" as being "Pretty damn inconvenient and un-discoverable", while yet another pointed out that the "fix" merely prevents "systemd from running fsck in the first place", and it "does not let you cancel a systemd-initiated boot-time fsck which is already in progress."
Further investigation showed that this is a known bug with systemd that was first reported in mid-2011, and remains unfixed as of late December 2014. At least one other user has also fallen victim to this bug.
How could a severe bug of this nature even happen in the first place? How can it remain unfixed over three years after it was first reported?
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday December 21 2014, @06:06PM
It's been standard practice to run disk data tests in boot time since before UNIX. Only exceptions I can think of were a few embedded systems with a burned firmware and DOS.
Hell, even the bios is running a checksum on itself to test for corrupting and tampering...
compiling...
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:45PM
The problem isn't running the tests then. That's desirable. The problem is not being able to cancel them if you're in a hurry.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.