[GTALUG] war story: power failure makes CentOS system unbootable

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 09:32:19PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Interesting.  I never knew that.

I didn't either.  I thought atime was only one better filesystems.

> But the dirty bit could/should be cleared whenever the FS is in a 
> consistent state.  Like: after a sync AND no files are open.  Maybe having 
> a process with a working directory on the FS counts as having a file 
> open; maybe not.

Well even windows apparently only clears it when unmounting.  I guess
updating that flag everytime you are done writing gets to be a lot
of writing.  And of a file is open for writing I guess that means the
filesystem is dirty until the file is closed and fully flushed to disk.

> I imagine that that would require cooperation of too many actors (each 
> thinking they are the star of the show).  I could experiment but how could 
> I test all the cases>
> 
> My initial position was: packagekit should not need to access the ESP
> except to apply updates.  But packagekit accesses the ESP when it
> starts up.
> 	<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1991228>
> Notice that there has been no response.

I don't usually see too many responses on bugs filed with redhat.

Is /boot/esp in /etc/fstab?

Well as far as I can tell from the man page for
systemd-gpt-auto-generator, it will actually automatically mount the ESP
partition to /efi or /boot (not sure about /boot/efi which seems to be
where most distributions put it as far as I know).  It also mentions a
flag you can set on the ESP partition to make it not auto mount it.

-- 
Len Sorensen