xfs.fsck change that is unhelpful

[Dave Chinner]

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 01:48:01PM -0700, Linda A. Walsh wrote:
> 
> Some time ago, when I upgraded a system, I ran into problems when
> it hit a file system that was offline.  It wasn't a critical
> partition, so it normally wouldn't have been an issue, but somewhere
> along the line
> someone mangled fsck.xfs.

fsck.xfs is behaving identically to e2fsck when presented with an
invalid block device - it exits with an error of 8, which is defined
as "operational error" in the e2fsck man page.

> Instead of doing the useful thing with an xfs file system and being a
> link to ->/bin/true, someone thought it would be neat to return failure if
> it couldn't find the file system that it was supposed to check

If the device is not present when the bootup sequence is attempting
to access it, then you've got a configuration error somewhere. It
should return an error.

> (mount-by-name, name not yet present, => system refuse to boot).

That sounds like a problem with the distro init scripts or you've
stuffed up your /etc/fstab config (i.e. fs_passno is wrong). Indeed,
setting fs_passno = 0 will cause the filesysetm fsck to be skipped
completely on boot, regardless of the fs type...

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david at fromorbit.com