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The many faces of fsckThe many faces of fsckPosted Sep 6, 2007 4:32 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467)Parent article: The many faces of fsck
This is a great article. I'm glad you mentioned the mysterious WAFL fsck program and ZFS. I think people should approach claims of "always consistent" with extreme skepticism. The existence of WAFL's fsck is little-known because NetApp salesmen swear that it does not exist. The file system is always consistent, therefore you can't possibly need a fsck. That is, until you come in one morning and your filers are fscking themselves, and you call support, and support tells you "oh, that's the fsck, didn't you know about it?"
So when Sun claims that ZFS doesn't need a fsck, one tends toward disbelief. And given that they are 10 years behind NetApp in the file system design division, I bet they have less experience with all the weird modes of failure, too.
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Always consistent Posted Sep 6, 2007 19:51 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] Yeah, the description of zdb reminded me of the early days of XFS on Irix,when we were told that no fsck was necessary because it was always consistent. Then later it was discovered that, yes, even journaling filesystems can get corrupted, and xfs_check and xfs_repair were added. (Which I've personally had to use on at least two separate occasions.)
Also, I must dispute the author's characterization of "xfs_check" as more
Always consistent Posted Sep 6, 2007 20:34 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] NetApp's fsck is (or at least was, at one time) "wack" which is surely the easiest to pronounce.
Always consistent Posted Sep 7, 2007 0:48 UTC (Fri) by vaurora (guest, #38407) [Link] Yeah, "wafl_check" indeed used to be "wack." I don't know the story behind the name change, but it seems likely that either the pronunciation was too confusing ("You want me to whack the file system? Are you crazy?"), or someone performed a humor-ectomy after NetApp got really successful.
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