Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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?

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday December 25 2014, @01:55PM

    by cafebabe (894) on Thursday December 25 2014, @01:55PM (#129093) Journal

    It was standard practice on the Amiga to have a boot/application partition and a data partition. If the data partition was screwed, it was possible to boot and attempt recovery. If the boot partition was screwed, data was safe and re-installation could proceed from floppy disks.

    For desktop Unix systems, a variation of this arrangement is to include a partition for dedicated swap-space. If one wishes to minimize harddisk head seek time, the swap-space partition should be arranged between the system and data partitions.

    I've tried more complicated arrangements but they are only worthwhile if you wish to purge large quantities of data on a regular basis.

    --
    1702845791×2
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Friday December 26 2014, @01:12AM

    by Marand (1081) on Friday December 26 2014, @01:12AM (#129193) Journal

    That's basically what my setup is -- partitions for /, /home, and swap -- except I think the swap partition's at the end instead of in the middle. I don't actually use swap that much so it's largely irrelevant where it is, but I still prefer having it on its own partition instead of using swap files. I just didn't think to mention swap since the discussion seemed to be more about partitioning the actual file stuff. If you have a lot of RAM, there's also the niche case of using ramdisks for certain parts of the filesystem, but that's getting even farther away from disk storage and partitioning...

    You have the same experience with over-partitioning that I do, basically. Too much becomes annoying to deal with eventually, but keeping the system stuff separate from the user stuff just tends to be good sense for a lot of reasons. Something else I didn't think to mention is that SSDs add another reason to do that kind of split, because you can put your OS and apps on the SSD and have the user data on the spinning disk, so that you have lots of space for data while getting the SSD speed increase.

    You can even do it in Windows, at least with Windows 7! It's a bit harder to get set up that way, but it can be done and it's worth it IMO because OS problems won't wipe out your files and settings. It should really be the default setup, but I get why it isn't. User space needs differ so it's not a one-size-fits-all solution the same way that dumping everything onto the same partition is.

    • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday December 29 2014, @05:57PM

      by cafebabe (894) on Monday December 29 2014, @05:57PM (#129998) Journal

      Putting your swap space at the end is possibly more efficient if you have a perpetually full disk.

      Regardless, if you wish to reduce the volume of writes to your SSD boot and application disk (and further increase access speed), add the noatime option in /etc/fstab. For each volume, this eliminates filing system writes to update access times. (This option is also useful for databases and high volume SMTP servers.)

      --
      1702845791×2