fsck - not needed with ext4 filesystems?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

My openSUSE 11.2 system has periodic running of fsck disabled for ext4 filesystems (Maximum mount count = -1, Check interval = 0).

What is the reason for this? Is it because fsck is not necessary on a periodic basis with ext4, and only necessary when errors are detected? Or is it because fsck has problems working on ext4 filesystems?

The ext3 filesystems do have it set (Maximum mount count = 500, Check interval = 5184000 (2 months)). I would like to know why fsck is not set to be activated for ext4. Anybody know?

2

AFAIK the things for ext3 go for ext4 as well. Did you ever make manual changes to fstab?

3

I’d be interested in the answer too, because I noticed the same thing on my ext4 FS and I accepted the defaults when installing.

4

My /home partition (which I have allready since maybe before SuSE 10):

  Mount count:  33
  Maximum mount count:  35
  Last checked:  Sun Feb 28 11:40:05 2010
  Check interval:  15552000 (6 months)

My / partition of openSUSE 10.3 (still available on my system):

  Mount count:  1
  Maximum mount count:  500
  Last checked:  Sun Mar 7 21:53:41 2010
  Check interval:  5184000 (2 months)

My / partition ofopenSUSE 11.2:

  Mount count:  67
  Maximum mount count:  -1
  Last checked:  Sat Jan 2 20:01:56 2010
  Check interval:  0 ()

I never changed the vaules set by the installation. It seems that they got more confident over time. But if this is wise??

@Knurpht: this is not from /etc/fstab, but these are file system parameters.

5

Note that if the filesystem was not unmounted cleanly, then a check will happen. Those parameters control the sporadic check that happens to make sure no undetected errors have accumulated. It would seem that the ext4 devs now believe that this is unnecessary. So I would like to know if that is so and the justification. Perhaps it’s time for me to do a search of ext4 correspondence.

6

I just googled "ext4 fs fsck " and checked the first ext4 entry which basically explains that fsck is not required due to the multiblock allocation scheme. fsck can still be used but will only check inodes of single block structure at present (if I interpreted the details right).

7

Thanks for sharing this.

8

Done some reading too, coming to the same result: not required.