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From: Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>
To: Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>
Cc: util-linux@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: mount nofail: what failures should we allow ?
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2016 15:00:28 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20160120200028.GE14840@vapier.lan> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20160120102845.olo242uqrfzld6rh@ws.net.home>

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On 20 Jan 2016 11:28, Karel Zak wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 06:24:58PM -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > i've received two requests for the "nofail" option.  the doc for the
> > option is a bit ... terse ... so it's hard to guess at the overall
> > intention.
> 
> man mount:
>    nofail Do not report errors for this device if it does not exist.
> 
> from my point of view this description is pretty explicit :-)

does it mean the device node doesn't exist (ENOENT) ?  or does it also
accept the node being there, but returning other errors like ENXIO (the
driver isn't loaded) or ENOTDIR (bad path) or ENOTBLK (used a bad path
like /dev/zero) or ENOMEDIUM (the node & hardware exists, but is not
loaded) ?  there's probably other errno values you could catch here.

surely you agree that "does not exist" does not cover all these cases.
or at the very least, it's pretty ambiguous/fuzzy.

> > (2) ignore unknown fs types.  e.g. when a kernel config/module is missing
> > support for the requested filesystem type.  so a fstab entry like:
> > 	..src..  /mnt/foo  somefs defaults,nofail
> > rather than error out with:
> > 	mount: unknown filesystem type 'somefs'
> > it would just issue a warning like it does for other nofail options.
> 
> I'm not sure with this. It's unusual situation when any filesystem is unknown
> for libblkid, but it's pretty common that kernel returns EINVAL. This
> happen when a kernel config/module is missing, but also if you specify
> wrong mount options and in some another situations. I don't think we
> want to hide such problems. It's too generic...

i think there's a lot going on in this response.  let me distill it a
bit.  if i have a reiserfs that is usable, but i forgot to enable or
load the reiserfs kernel driver, should nofail be allowed to skip ?
or is this a hard failure ?
-mike

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  reply	other threads:[~2016-01-20 20:00 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2016-01-19 23:24 mount nofail: what failures should we allow ? Mike Frysinger
2016-01-20 10:28 ` Karel Zak
2016-01-20 20:00   ` Mike Frysinger [this message]
2016-01-21 10:18     ` Karel Zak
2016-01-20 20:20 ` [PATCH] mount: allow nofail to silence ENOMEDIUM cases Mike Frysinger
2016-01-21  9:51   ` Karel Zak

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