Journaling file systems revisited

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

My old laptop was running SuSE8.0 with Reiser file system. However, I was 
having some difficulty with file system corruption. To compund it, the 
wedge (which contains my Cd and floppy) would sometimes fail to be 
detected. The only way to repair a reiser file system is to use one of the 
fix parameters on an unmounted file system. So, on the root file system, 
one must boot from a rescue, which I could not do because I could not get 
the wedge to be recognized. (I paid a tech to fix the wedge because the 
last time I fixed it I lost a spring and a couple of screws). It appears 
that the corruption was due to a bad memory expansion module, which is now 
in the waste basket. 

Now for the question:
The laptop gets booted 2 or 3 times a day. At home, I have some file 
systems I keep unmounted except for backups, so they get mounted daily. 
Normally they would require periodic full fscks (either by the number of 
mounts or the time). This can be adjusted via tunefs. Is their any point at 
which ext3 would require a full fsck through normal mount and unmount. I 
suspect that reiser rarely would require this. So, in general, I would 
assume that a journalling file system does not need a periodic equivalent 
to the fsck. Glenn, I think you have a lot of experience with JFS or XFS. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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