Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Richard Yao <ryao@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: Does OpenRC really need mount-ro
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2016 14:00:39
Message-Id: F871FA00-57DE-44F1-86BD-B98F15709E56@gentoo.org
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] rfc: Does OpenRC really need mount-ro by William Hubbs
1 > On Feb 16, 2016, at 1:05 PM, William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
2 >
3 > All,
4 >
5 > I have a bug that points out a significant issue with
6 > /etc/init.d/mount-ro in OpenRC.
7 >
8 > Apparently, there are issues that cause it to not work properly for file
9 > systems which happen to be pre-mounted from an initramfs [1].
10 >
11 > This service only exists in the Linux world; there is no equivalent in
12 > OpenRC for any other operating systems we support.
13 >
14 > The reason it exists is very vague to me; I think it has something to do
15 > with claims of data loss in the past.
16 >
17 > I'm asking for more specific information, and if there is none, due to
18 > the bug I lincluded in this message, I am considering removing this
19 > service in 0.21 since I can't find an equivalent anywhere else.
20
21 If you shutdown the system while ext4 or XFS is mounted rw, then there is no guarantee that dirty data writeout finishes and you can get situations where partial writes to disks from power being cut at the end of the shutdown process kills the filesystem.
22
23 That said, ZFS does not need to be remounted rw because it is an atomic filesystem. There might be data loss, but it would only be the last 5 seconds of unsynced data (which is safe to use) and there would be no risk of killing it.
24
25 > Thanks,
26 >
27 > William
28 >
29 > [1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=573760