On Sat 03 Sep 2022 at 08:03:38 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Sat, Sep 03, 2022 at 09:56:34AM +0100, Mike wrote: > > Rereading my original request, I think perhaps I wasn't entirely clear > > on a couple of points: > > I thought it was clear. Some of the responses completely baffled me. > One person even mentioned xterm -- like, *what*? How does xterm come > into play when you're booting a server and there's no GUI yet?
TL;DR sorry to shock your sensibilities by the mention of xterm. -- It doesn't. If you read what I wrote, you will see that I mentioned xterm as a disclaimer that /I/ don't know anything about the arguments to -C because /I/ was using xterm. In case you missed it, my post was to point out that fsck can still, with appropriate filesystems, spit out a progress bar of equals signs. There was no indication then of which filesystems were in use until the OP's second post, nor of their disposition, nor which init system is being used. With sysvinit, I think it could be trivial to check the disks sequentially, /if/ there were several disks /and/ the increase in time taken were less important than the confidence gained in seeing signs of life. I don't have the time or confidence to delve into bowels of systemd and initrds like David. > > Maybe I'm being nostalgic but I seem to recall in days gone by that fsck > > printed a progress bar out of hashes to show how it was getting along. And that was written long after my post. > Near as I can tell, that was a feature of the old sysv-rc scripts, > which ran (originally/mostly) in series, instead of in parallel. The > fsck progress bar(s) seem to have been lost in the move to systemd, > perhaps because writing a progress bar isn't considered viable in a > highly parallel boot system where other things might also be trying to > write to the console. Or perhaps for other reasons. The root filesystem should never be checked at the same time as others. As it's pointed out somewhere or other, you don't know whether fsck is intact and competent to check other filesystems until it's been checked itself. When I booted my system this morning, I naturally selected the FSCK option in Grub, and sure enough, I saw a progress bar as the root filesystem was checked. Nothing for the others, though. (I use systemd. I'm sure it's trivial to edit sysvinit scripts to add -C and make sequential if either is not the default.) As for why -C bothered me, I think I'm dredging up some wrinkle I encountered when I wanted a cron job to print a little table to the screen 30 secnds after booting. I remember having to open a tty specifically, because stdout didn't seem to appear on the screen. (I guess it would just try to email it instead.) I also ?know that some people don't see all the booting messages on the screen because they have some sort of ?splash screen (is that what plymouth is all about?). So I don't know if -C <some argument> is meant to cope with possibilities like that, or when fscking non-root disks is still occurring while a graphical login screen is displayed. Cheers, David.
