background_fsck=no does not work?

[Scott Long]

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.

> 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.

> 
> 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.

Scott