Re: Add a norecovery option to ext3/4?

Andreas Dilger
2007-04-09T10:14:44Z

On Apr 08, 2007 22:24 -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> Samuel Thibault wrote:
> >Distribution installers usually try to probe OSes for building a suited
> >grub menu. Unfortunately, mounting an ext3 partition, even in read-only
> >mode, does perform some operations on the filesystem (log recovery).
> >This is not a good idea since it may silently garbage data.
>
> Can you elaborate? Under what circumstances is log replay going to harm
> data? Do you mean that the installer mounts partitions, looking for
> what OS is installed? How is that harmful?

If that disk was actually in use on another system but just exported
via a SAN to this node you've potentially corrupted the filesystem.

It's a bad idea to just go ahead and mount filesystems that you aren't
told to mount.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.