Re: The ext3 way of journalling

[Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>]

Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> writes:
>
> Now, there are good reasons for doing periodic checks every N mounts
> and after M months.  And it has to do with PC class hardware.  (Ted's
> aphorism: "PC class hardware is cr*p"). 

If these reasons are good ones (some skepticism here) then the correct
way to really handle this would be to do regular background scrubbing
during runtime; ideally with metadata checksums so that you can actually
detect all corruption.

But since fsck is so slow and disks are so big this whole thing
is a ticking time bomb now. e.g. it is not uncommon to require tens
of minutes or even hours of fsck time and some server that reboots
only every few months will eat that when it happens to reboot.
This means you get a quite long downtime. 

-Andi