Background fsck

[Rahul Siddharthan]

Quoting Chris Pressey <cpressey at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> My own opinion is that the "speed-up-recovery-after-a-crash" thing,
> while apparently a very sexy problem for filesystem programmers to
> tackle, is going to become more and more of a non-problem as UPS's
> become more and more consumer-friendly.
> 
> Like, if I can get one of these:
> 
>   http://www.outletpc.com/c5401.html
> 
> for $20US, and if it gives me enough time to sync everything to disc
> before the power really goes out, then my HDDs will rarely power down in
> an inconsistent state anyway, yes?

Well, power failures are only one possible cause.  System crashes/lockups, 
either because it's an "unstable" development platform or because of buggy
hardware or device drivers, are (for me anyway) a much more common
cause of unclean disks.  And on FreeBSD 5.x, if you have a linux ext2fs
slice mounted (even if it's read-only) and you don't explicitly unmount it
before shutting down, the buffers don't sync.

Rahul