On Sat, 10 Apr 2010 12:04:33 -0000 Theodore Ts'o <[email protected]> wrote: > We don't update the backup copies of the block group descriptor > tables; we use the backup copies to retrieve static data so we can > recover the file system, and how many of the inodes in a block group > have been used/initialized is dynamic data.
Oh dear, so the kernel and fsck never update the backup copies? Seems to defeat the purpose doesn't it? I mean if they are never updated, why have them? Their initial content could be regenerated by mkfs -n couldn't it? So if fsck finds the main bg descriptor corrupt and isn't sure if the inode table was zeroed or not, and happens to find old data that looks like inodes in the uninitialized table, wouldn't it be highly likely that such inodes would claim blocks that are either marked as free, or allocated by other inodes? And these inodes would not have any directory entries pointing to them, so wouldn't the worst case then be that fsck places copies of garbage in lost+found, but no actual data would be lost? If the worst case scenario in the unlikely event of the bg descriptors being corrupted is that fsck finds garbage data and puts it in lost+found, then I don't see a downside to enabling this option. -- lazy_itable_init not on by default https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/556621 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
