Sysinstall automatic filesystem size generation.

[Kevin Oberman]

> From: "Darren Pilgrim" <dmp at bitfreak.org>
> Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 23:07:16 -0700
> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
> 
> From: Julian H. Stacey
> > "Steven Hartland" wrote:
> > > data. In addition to that I dont have to sit though 1 hour worth of 
> > > offline checks when it crashes for what ever reason which I do on
> our 
> > > FreeBSD boxes.
> > 
> > [Apologies if I missed something, coming in late on thread, but ...]
> > 
> > FreeBSD-4 does fsck on dirty filesystems before going multi 
> > user: You wait.
> > FreeBSD-5.* & 6.0-BETA3 : fsck runs in background after boot: 
> > No waiting.
> 
> A dirty volume can cause some fairly severe problems if it's used before
> the background fsck completes repairs.  I'd rather delay restart than
> face even more damage when something else dies because the volume was
> mounted dirty.

This should NOT be the case if you have softupdates enabled for a
partition. And fsck should not background if the partition does not have
soft updates enabled.

If the volume with soft updates is mounted 'dirty', it should have NO
implications other then not having all of the free space on the disk
available until the fsck completes. Read-write access should always be
safe and no data should be effected by the fsck.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634