background_fsck=no does not work?

[Palle Girgensohn]

--On söndag, april 24, 2005 08.11.06 -0600 Scott Long <scottl at samsco.org> 
wrote:

> Palle Girgensohn wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> on a 5.4-prerelease machine (dell 2850 dual cpu, running amd64), I have
>> this in rc.conf:
>>
>> fsck_y_enable="YES"
>> background_fsck="NO"
>>
>>
>> Still, I'm not certain that fsck is really run at startup.
>
> Are you expecting a fsck to be run at every startup, regardless of
> whether the filesystems are dirty?  If so, that is not what these
> options do.

No, but the machine crashes a lot, sometimes a couple of times in a day 
(oddly mostly on week-ends, and sometimes it can be stable for a week or 
two). I'm clueless to what's causing it, but suspect that the amd64 stuff 
is broken, at least for this machine (dual Xeon). I wanted foreground fsck 
since I thought there might be a problem with the file systems, but I guess 
I was wrong...

>> At least,
>> running fsck on in multiuser reveals information like below, but perhaps
>> that is normal for an active file system?
>
> Yes, because of the caching effect of the VM layer, the filesystem will
> not always be clean.  Softupdates (hopefully) means that it will be
> consistent and recoverable, but what you're seeing here is normal and
> expected.  Running foreground-fsck on a mounted filesystem has limited
> value, though.

OK, I reckoned it was like that. Thanks.

>> I'm having stability problems with this machine (it crashes
>> sporadically) and I suspect it might have something to do with problems
>> in the file system. Could this be true, or is the below stuff completely
>> normal?
>
> You'll need to enable DDB and KDB and post the information from your
> crashes.

OK, thanks, it's time to dig into that, I guess...

/Palle