Re: FSCK message suppressed during booting? (2.6.9-rc2)

[Chiaki <ishikawa@yk.rim.or.jp>]

Chiaki wrote:
> Bernd Eckenfels wrote:
> 
>> In article <415B5034.6060809@yk.rim.or.jp> you wrote:
>>
>>> That is, under previous 2.4.xx kernel, I would have gotten
>>> "The disk was not unmounted cleanly. Running fsck." or
>>> some such message and fsck printed its
>>> progress bar using ASCII characters.
>>
>>
>>
>> Well, this is not a kernel function, your Distribution is calling fsck in
>> the bootup scripts, and fsck is calling the filesystem specific
>> implementation and this is checking if fsck is needed.
>>
>> If you do not get this messages anymore contact your linux distribution
>> provider.
>>
>>
> 
> Thank you for the comment.
> 
> Well, I have installed 2.6.9-rc2 on my own after having used
> Debian with my own updated kernel 2.4.2x series for a few years now.
> I certainly upgraded moduleutil and other packages to run
> 2.6.9-rc2, but have not specifically updated fsck.
> (I DID ran apt-get -u update and apt-get -u upgrade to pick up
> the latest packages a week ago or so.).
> 
> Agreed that the starting fsck under stock Debian scheme
> may depend on 2.4.xx features which may not be available
> on 2.6.yy series kernel. I will get in contact with fsck
> package (or boot script) maintainer to see
> if we can improve this.
> 
>  >Do you habe maybe a journalling filesystem? Or do you have set some 
> flags to
>  > force the skip of fsck (/fastboot)
>  >
> 
> Well, I am running 2.6.9-rc2 from loadlin as follows.
> 
> loadlin 269rc2 root=/dev/sda6 ro vga=3 scsihosts=sym53c8xx:tmscsim
> 
> I noticed the fsck message lines were missing on the reboot after
> a hard-hung forced me to hit reset button in the end.
> The message lines were missing, but it seems that fsck
> certainly was running invisibly. Thus the
> boot sequence halted as if the computer got hung again
> until fsck finished and bootting continued. This was very
> annoying.
> 


OK, maybe I was not clear enough in the first post.

Fsck seemed to run during the reboot
after a reset button was hit to recover from a hard hung.

However, NO OUTPUT message from fsck is shown on the console.
It progressed silently : I could hear the disk access
(head movement) and this made me very uncomfortable.
With a test kernel accessing disk furiously without
telling me what it does during otherwise smooth booting
process after a hard reset, I may need to consider
the chance of kernel running wild and trashing the file system.
So that is why I rebooted the system using 2.4.xx which I have
used for quite a long time to make sure that the file system(s)
are fsck'ed and then cleanly remounted.

Anyway, before contacting the Debian package maintainer, I found
the following.
IF during the booting the environment variable TERM
is set to "dumb", "network", "unknown" or not set at all
the progressive horizontal bar display (-C option to fsck)
is disabled in the Debian startup script.

Maybe the TERM setup for console during booting has changed between
kernel 2.4.2x and 2.6.9-rc2?


A little more detail:

I checked the Debian startup script myself.
Now I notice that if the fsck is invoked in a startup script and $TERM is
set to "dumb" or "network" or "unknown" or not set at all, this
progress bar display (-C option to fsck)
is not done by the Debian start up script.

Maybe between 2.4.2x and 2.6.9-rc2,
the boot console $TERM setting changed?

--- begin Excerpt from /etc/init.d/checkroot.sh

if [ "$doswap" = yes ]
then
	[ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && echo "Activating swap."
	swapon -a 2> /dev/null
fi

	... omission...

#
#	The actual checking is done here.
#
if [ "$rootcheck" = yes ]
then
	if [ -f /forcefsck ]
	then
		force="-f"
	else
		force=""
	fi

	if [ "$FSCKFIX" = yes ]
	then
		fix="-y"
	else
		fix="-a"
	fi

	spinner="-C"
	case "$TERM" in
		dumb|network|unknown|"")
			spinner="" ;;
	esac
	# This Linux/s390 special case should go away.
	if [ "${KERNEL}:${MACHINE}" = Linux:s390 ]
	then
		spinner=""
	fi

	echo "Checking root file system..."
	fsck $spinner $force $fix -t $roottype $rootdev
	FSCKCODE=$?

--- end Excerpt


I think I saw Activating Swap message.  But I am not sure if I saw
"Checking root file system..." message during a reboot after the RESET
button was hit due to a hung.  I was not paying attention to that.
But definitely, I didn't see at all the
growing ASCII character-base horizontal bar with a spinning char on
the right (/ - \ |).  This is a way to show progress bar. This is
shown with the -C option to fsck. I usually see this progressive
bar for fsck during reboot under 2.4.2x kernel.
So obviously "-C" is reset to "". I am NOT using s390 :-)

(OR the output from this shell is eaten by some other mechanism.
  I need to understand the stdio/stdout setting of the shell
  invoking this script further.)

I will check with the maintainer of Debian package further.




-- 
int main(void){int j=2003;/*(c)2003 cishikawa. */
char t[] ="<CI> @abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.,\n\"";
char *i ="g>qtCIuqivb,gCwe\np@.ietCIuqi\"tqkvv is>dnamz";
while(*i)((j+=strchr(t,*i++)-(int)t),(j%=sizeof t-1),
(putchar(t[j])));return 0;}/* under GPL */