[systemd-devel] fsckd needs to go

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On 3 April 2015 at 05:58, Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> Heya,
>
> so we discussed the whole fsckd situation a bit more here in Berlin,
> and we came to the conclusion that fsckd really should not exist the
> way it does in systemd.
>
> To start with, the code is really wrong, it should never have been
> merged in its current state, the read/write logic for the sockets is
> completely borked (I cannot even boot my own machine reliably with
> it!). And to my knowledge there has been no attempt to fix all of
> that, even though I asked for it. It also doesn't do at all what I
> suggested initially, as the flow of data is now fsck → systemd-fsck →
> systemd-fsckd → plymouth, and that's just crazy, that's two steps too
> many. systemd is supposed to be a few components playing well
> together, but certainly not a baroque network of components where data
> is passed though four hoops before it reaches the destination...
>
> Then, there's my general reservation with fsckd at all: file systems
> that still require offline fsck are certainly not the future, but we
> develop stuff for the future, and the idea to kill an fsck process
> while it is running is also very very questionnable. There's a reason

Is this about progress & control data or all things fsck?

IMHO we do need to continue support ext4, and running fsck.ext4 when
enforced, at least from initramfs, with progress output to the user
and ability to cancel. Or is even fsck.ext4 obsolete these days and
shouldn't be run automatically any more?

How this is implemented - e.g. inside systemd project or not, is not
relevant, but systemd seems to be a better place for this.

In upstart world, this completely was offloaded to mountall which
directly passed "special update" messages to plymouthd, which themes
could choose to parse and dispaly / act upon. This however was
ubuntu-specific patch I believe.

The current implementation/integration for systemd-fsck is also
heading to plymouth upstream for generic support there in themes, I
believe.

-- 
Regards,

Dimitri.

https://clearlinux.org
Open Source Technology Center
Intel Corporation (UK) Ltd. - Co. Reg. #1134945 - Pipers Way, Swindon SN3 1RJ.