Faster Boot Planned for ReiserFS Partitions

Nov 28, 2007

Under certain circumstances ReiserFS will check the whole filesystem on rebooting, although this is not actually necessary due to its journaling function. Kernel developers are currently discussing a patch that will accelerate the system launch.

Many distributions call the fsck -a command for every partition they use. In the case of ReiserFS the filesystem checks its complete structure which can cause long waits for large partitions. However, ReiserFS uses journaling that makes the check redundant.

Kernel developer Jeff Mahoney submitted a kernel patch that tells the kernel to count how often it has mounted a filesystem. The kernel will continue to store the last check time in the filesystem’s superblock. By default, the filesystem notifies the administrator if it has been mounted more than 30 times without checking, or if the last checks is over 180 days in the past. These values can be modified using the tunefs command which is included with the reiserfstools package.

Mahoney has proposed the patch that modifies both the ReiserFS subsystem and the matching user tools to the ReiserFS team via its mailing list. It is hard to say when the proposal will make the release version.

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