Re: Add a norecovery option to ext3/4?

Samuel Thibault
2007-04-09T03:31:39Z

Eric Sandeen, le Sun 08 Apr 2007 22:24:50 -0500, a écrit :
> 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?
>
> Ohhh... this is http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=417407
> isn't it?

Yes.

> Hm, so the root cause there seems that the installer found 2 legs of a
> mirror and mounted them independently, recovering them independently...
> But why did that cause problems?

Because that thrashed his data (or at least it didn't help to keep data
safe).

> Other options you may have in the installer, though, is to check for
> md superblocks before mounting bare partitions, or maybe use the
> BLKROSET ioctl to set the block device to read-only prior to mount,
> for added insurance...

That's one the things proposed in the bugreport yes.

Samuel