On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 12:59:32PM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote: > > > >- The system contains at least one very large partition. > >- At startup time, fsck starts to check all partitions (say because the > > box had a very long uptime) > >- fsck chose to run two checkers, one on a small partition and one on > > the big partition > >- fsck chose to display the progress bar on the small partition > >- fsck finish checking the small partition and continues to check all > > the other smaller partitions > >- fsck continues to check the large partition WITHOUT ANY PROGRESS BARS > > > >If the large partition is so large that it takes, say, an hour to finish, > >the machine will appear to be hung. > > Have you actually *seen* this happening, or are you positing this as a > theoretical situation just from reading the fsck man page. In fact, > the way fsck works is that when a child e2fsck finishes, fsck will > look for another ext2/ext3 filesystem check taking place, and send > that child e2fsck an USR1 signal, which requests it to start > displaying a progress bar.
Yes, I have seen this happening. And in fact I pressed the big Reset button a couple of times before realizing that fsck was checking the huge partition. (I forgot how I got to realize that though, since it is very non-obvious. I suppose it was during a manual fsck, maybe within a screen(1) session.) (I forgot to mention in my original report that this will happen only if the huge partition is on a separate physical disk from the small partitions. Obviously everyone who has read my report so far knows this must be the case, but I just to want the records to have this explicitly mentioned somewhere.) > So in fact, the right thing should be happening today, to avoid the > problem which you described above. It is not. Or at least it was not when I filed my original report. If it was not but is not any more, then my report can be closed as fixed. (Or it could be a packaging problem. Apparently, upgrading programs on Debian sometimes fails to automatically upgrade its associated libraries. I have been told not to upgrade my system piecemeal, but it sounds philosophically wrong to require the user to know what program requires what libraries and manually specify everything in an apt-get install.) > Regards, > > - Ted Regards, -- Ambrose Li <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Webmaster & de-facto in-house graphic artist Chinese Cultural Centre of Greater Toronto / http://www.cccgt.org/ 5183-5193 Sheppard Avenue East, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M1B 5Z5 +1 416 292 9293 / FAX +1 416 292 9215 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
