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posted by LaminatorX on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the fsking-pid0 dept.

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?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:05PM

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:05PM (#128081) Journal

    Have you tried running Pale Moon or any other 'old school' browser that uses firefox-compatible add-ons? I don't want to have to run a 'modern' version of FF with its 'improved' interface. The people I support want something than they are comfortable with - and MATE and Pale Moon is ideal for them. Have you tried reading LUKS encrypted drives using BSD? I have 14 drives, all LUKS encrypted, which BSD cannot access. Can you imagine how long it will take to convert those drives to GELI and reformat all of the data? And then I will have drives that Linux machines cannot access.

    BSD is good - I have it on several machines - but it does not solve all of the problems, indeed it introduces some problems of its own.

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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:34PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:34PM (#128091) Journal

    That was my issue. I tried out PCBSD and I have to say, it required no fiddling -- it installed and just worked. However, I have a LUKS encrypted drive that I can't open in PCBSD so I installed Mint until I transfer that data off that drive and then redo the encryption the BSD way. I also had a trouble reading off an EXT3 drive I was using for the test and it got corrupted during a hard shutoff (windy night, momentary power failure). That wasn't awe inspiring.

    Interestingly, video was super smooth in PCBSD. In Mint it isn't bad but it is noticeably choppy. PCBSD boots in maybe 30-40 seconds, Mint boots in about 5 seconds or less --it is shockingly fast at booting. Still, I'd suffer through 25 seconds of boot time to enjoy perfectly smooth video. The hassle for me is going to be migrating all my drives off EXT3.