[Bug 272833] System becomes unbootable if fstab contains a ext2 entry which is marked dirty

From: <bugzilla-noreply_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2023 23:10:02 UTC
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=272833

            Bug ID: 272833
           Summary: System becomes unbootable if fstab contains a ext2
                    entry which is marked dirty
           Product: Base System
           Version: Unspecified
          Hardware: Any
                OS: Any
            Status: New
          Severity: Affects Only Me
          Priority: ---
         Component: kern
          Assignee: bugs@FreeBSD.org
          Reporter: doctorwhoguy@gmail.com

I multiboot with Windows 10, Gentoo Linux, and FreeBSD. I have a second drive
formatted to ext4 for storage, and I have an fstab entry for that second drive.
I added an /etc/fstab entry for that secondary drive on my FreeBSD system. For
whatever reason, it was marked dirty. When I booted into FreeBSD, it froze
during the boot process when it tried to mount that drive.

The only immediate solution for me to successfully boot into FreeBSD was for me
to reboot into single-user mode, edit the fstab to comment out that entry, and
reboot into FreeBSD.

The longer-term solution was to reboot into Gentoo and run fsck because
FreeBSD's fsck would not deal with the problem.

Frankly, I think that if FreeBSD is going to offer support for ext2/3/4
filesystems, it's fsck should also support those filesystems. And I'm sure
those developers would help if asked.

I realize that introducing support to fsck will be work. But, in the interim,
mounting failures should fail with very clear and vocal error messages about
why the boot process failed. As it is, the boot process simply froze with no
messages whatsoever. It was simply a lucky guess, on my part, to figure out why
the boot process halted.

Request: At MINIMUM, add informative messages to why the boot process failed.
Next, add fsck support to ext2/3/4 filesystems. Finally, perhaps allow mounting
to fail, with descriptive error messages, and allow the boot process to
continue.

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