how does a system come up if you disable background fsck ?

[Ensel Sharon]

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, illoai at gmail.com wrote:

> On 3/13/06, Ensel Sharon <user at dhp.com> wrote:
> >
> > I have disabled background fsck in my /etc/rc.conf with:
> >
> > background_fsck="no"
> >
> > But I am curious - what does this mean for the system if the system
> > crashes ?
> >
> > Does this mean that the system will wait for all non root partitions to
> > fully fsck before coming up into multi-user mode ?
> >
> > OR
> >
> > Does it mean the system will boot up quickly into multi-user mode, but the
> > non-root partitions will just not be mounted and/or usable until I fsck
> > them by hand ?
> 
> Hit the power button and see for yourself.


Ok, I did.  The fsck on the filesystem, if I do it manually while in
multi-user mode, ususally takes two hours.  This time, the machine took
about 20 minutes to come back up from my ungraceful power cycle.

I also notice that /var/run/dmesg.boot is a zero byte file, and
/var/log/messages has nothing about the boot cycle in it.

So, two questions:

- is the lack of data in /var because it was a non-root filesystem and was
busy fscking when dmesg.boot and messages would normally be written ?

- why did the machine come up 20 minutes later ?  I would htink either it
would come up right away, or come up two hours later ... perhaps / and
/var were fsck'd at boot, and my big partition is actually mounted dirty ?

Thanks.