On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 7:06 AM, Janne Johansson <icepic...@gmail.com> wrote: >> /forcefsck and /fastboot have nothing to do with that >> they are not even administered by the fs >> > I wasn't trying to imply the filesystem is putting the files there, nor > reading them. Rather, those two files show that > "since there is no way to mark known brokeness in a ext file system, we wrap > it up in shell scripts that create and look for > B those files in order to 'know' if the filesystems are broken or not and if > fsck is in order" > sorry, but those files aren't for that purpose. they're just means of queuing fscks and never intended as a viable replacement for dirty flags
conversely, openbsd has got /fastboot, yet aptly omits /forcefsck you could say the latter has been avoided because it's a chicken and egg problem, but keep in mind that it forces fsck on all filesystems with a fs_passno greater than zero, not just root, and that / is very unlikely to become corrupted because it's typically split and seldom written to
