I think this situation is a disaster. Not having periodical checks on
your arrays, or rather, having them fail quietly without even notifying
the admin, can lead to grave consequences. (People tend to underestimate
how critical it is to have periodical consistency checks, especially in
RAID5's).
Finding this bug report is not exactly easy. I've spent a whole day
trying to find out why do I not have consistency checks, and I could not
advance any further than "why does checkarray not do anything". Not to
mention it was a very lucky coincidence that I even noticed not having
consistency checks.
So, how about accepting this patch and having checkarray use bash by
default? I see no downsides to this; bash is an "essential" package, so
most people do have bash installed; even if they don't, they will still
not have critical maintenance fail silently, but get an error message.
Even if this is fixed in more recent kernels, 4.1-LTS is one of the most
popular ones, if not THE most popular, and it still has this problem.
But still... "One byte at a time"? Was this the reason why Linus wrote
one of his most famous quotes about this being incredibly stupid rather
than simply "inefficient"? %) Is there at least a bug filed against dash
about, um, "optimizing the inefficient behaviour potentially leading to
major problems on most widely used LTS kernels"?
--
darkpenguin
