[gentoo-user] Re-post:How to get jfs root partition to properly fsck on power failure?

[gentoo-user] Re-post:How to get jfs root partition to properly fsck on power failure?

[Aaron Nichols]

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Hey all, I know somebody here has got to have info that may be of help. If 
I'm totally missing something obvious here feel free to beat me to a pulp - 
but anything is better than silence :) Since I didn't get any responses last 
time I'll try one more time. 

Original message:

Hello Everyone,
I feel like the answer here should be obvious, but either my google skills 
have deteriorated badly, I'm missing the obvious, or I've just run into a 
strange problem (which I doubt). 

I have a Gentoo install with the following filesystem layout (from fstab):

/dev/sda2 /boot ext3 noatime 1 2
/dev/sda6 / jfs noatime 1 1
/dev/sda3 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/sda5 /var jfs noatime 0 2
/dev/sda7 /home jfs noatime 0 2

Things work fine under normal circumstances, however if the machine is 
powered off uncleanly (power button, power failure, etc) it refuses to boot. 
The problem seems to stem from the fact that the root partition does not get 
checked prior to mounting. I have the following grub stanza which boots the 
system. It includes the "ro" option which is supposed to tell the kernel to 
mount the root partition read-only at first to perform a fsck. 

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.12-r6
root (hd0,1)
kernel /kernel-genkernel-x86-2.6.12-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc 
ramdisk=8192 real_root=/dev/sda6 udev hda=ide-scsi hde=ide-scsi ro
initrd /initramfs-genkernel-x86-2.6.12-gentoo-r6

When booting this it basicly starts udev, then tries to mount filesystems 
and says /dev/sda6 is not a valid partition and drops me into busybox. 

The way I'm able to recover this is to boot to the live CD,
fsck.jfs/dev/sda6 and then reboot and the remaining filesystems fsck
fine and the
system boots. However, one thing I notice is that once / is unmounted 
unexpectedly, it cannot be mounted prior to an fsck (get errors from mount). 
This seems like a bit of a chicken & egg situation.

I can't believe this is a unique problem I've stumbled upon - does anyone 
have either an obvious answer to this question or some examples of a working 
gentoo install using jfs as the root partition (please, no responses of 
"yeah, works fine for me" if you can resist).

I'll happily provide more info as desired - but thought I'd start here. 
 
Aaron

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re-post:How to get jfs root partition to properly fsck on power failure?

[Benno Schulenberg]

Aaron Nichols wrote:
> The way I'm able to recover this is to boot to the live CD,
> fsck.jfs/dev/sda6 and then reboot

Do you have an /sbin/fsck.jfs on your root partition?  Because here 
it doesn't exist.  Hmm, you did emerge jfsutils?

(Yes, you said that "the remaining filesystems fsck fine", but 
journalled file systems do not really need to be fully checked, 
they just need to replay a few journal entries, and fine.)

The problem I had here with reiserfs upon an irregular shutdown, 
was that the root partition mounted okay, replaying several journal 
entries, but the boot scripts refused to mount the home partition, 
seemingly because it was uncleanly unmounted.  I've sidestepped 
this by changing the localmount script, to simply explicitly mount 
the home partition, and now all is fine after a lockup (experiments 
with a driver): journals get replayed and it boots on.

Maybe the scripts are doing something similar wrong for you, but 
for the root partition, refusing to mount it because it is unclean 
and it gets confused by the journal?

Benno
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Re: [gentoo-user] Re-post:How to get jfs root partition to properly fsck on power failure?

[Aaron Nichols]

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On 8/7/05, Benno Schulenberg <benno.schulenberg@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Aaron Nichols wrote:
> > The way I'm able to recover this is to boot to the live CD,
> > fsck.jfs/dev/sda6 and then reboot
> 
> Do you have an /sbin/fsck.jfs on your root partition? Because here
> it doesn't exist. Hmm, you did emerge jfsutils?



Boy, I wish it were that easy!

(~)>> which fsck.jfs
/sbin/fsck.jfs

The problem I had here with reiserfs upon an irregular shutdown,
> was that the root partition mounted okay, replaying several journal
> entries, but the boot scripts refused to mount the home partition,
> seemingly because it was uncleanly unmounted. I've sidestepped
> this by changing the localmount script, to simply explicitly mount
> the home partition, and now all is fine after a lockup (experiments
> with a driver): journals get replayed and it boots on.
> 
> Maybe the scripts are doing something similar wrong for you, but
> for the root partition, refusing to mount it because it is unclean
> and it gets confused by the journal?
> 
> 
Perhaps, though I'm not sure how to determine that this is the cause, nor 
how I would fix it. I have this problem on 3 different Gentoo hosts I run 
(the only 3 Gentoo hosts I have) so it's not an isolated problem on one 
machine. Granted, all were setup by me using the guides on gentoo's site, so 
if I made a mistake I probably did it 3 times. 

I was going to try the "non-genkernel" approach and see if that worked any 
differently, as the grub configuration is quite different. I have examples 
of other distributions which work fine using jfs in this situation, but 
those do not use udev and none require the same options that genkernel seems 
to. 

Anyways, thanks for the info - if there are any other bits of useful info 
let me know. I'll continue to fiddle.

Aaron

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re-post:How to get jfs root partition to properly fsck on power failure?

[A. Khattri]

On Sun, 7 Aug 2005, Aaron Nichols wrote:

> I was going to try the "non-genkernel" approach and see if that worked any
> differently, as the grub configuration is quite different. I have examples
> of other distributions which work fine using jfs in this situation, but
> those do not use udev and none require the same options that genkernel seems
> to.

I dont know if genkernel has much to do with it - OTOH, a lot of us dont
use genkernel because of people always reporting problems with it...


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Re: [gentoo-user] Re-post:How to get jfs root partition to properly fsck on power failure?

[Aaron Nichols]

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On 8/8/05, A. Khattri <ajai@bway.net> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 7 Aug 2005, Aaron Nichols wrote:
> 
> > I was going to try the "non-genkernel" approach and see if that worked 
> any
> > differently, as the grub configuration is quite different. I have 
> examples
> > of other distributions which work fine using jfs in this situation, but
> > those do not use udev and none require the same options that genkernel 
> seems
> > to.
> 
> I dont know if genkernel has much to do with it - OTOH, a lot of us dont
> use genkernel because of people always reporting problems with it...


Thanks, apparently you can add yet another reason not to use it. I 
recompiled the kernel without using genkernel, used the grub.conf stanza 
below, and now this works fine. 

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.12-r6
root (hd0,1)
kernel /kernel-2.6.12-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/sda6 udev hda=ide-scsi 
hde=ide-scsi ro

Very frustrating. 

Thanks for helping. 

Aaron

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