panic again

[Don Lewis]

On 26 Oct, Pavel Merdine wrote:

> Again, somehow after a panic on ONE file system, other filesystems are
> not fully synced. The system conplaints that they are dirty after
> restart. So it seems like one panic lead to corruption of another
> systems. Maybe I'm wrong here too. But I dont see any good in fsck-ing
> each time.

When the OS detects these types of problems, then something (we don't
know what) unexpected has happened, so we can no longer trust the state
of the machine.  If we can't trust the state of the machine, then it is
dangerous to sync any of the file systems, because doing so could damage
them with corrupt data.

> Background fsck does not work in reality as well, because the system
> can panic thousand times before errors are fixed.

It might be a good idea to force a foreground fsck if the system panics
before a background fsck has marked a dirty filesystem clean.