From: Calvin Owens Subject: e2fsprogs: Fsck of read-only FS w/ external journal fails after 1.42.5? Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 14:53:50 -0500 Message-ID: <20130504195350.GA20046@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Cc: linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org To: Theodore Ts'o , Eric Sandeen Return-path: Received: from mail-gg0-f175.google.com ([209.85.161.175]:56565 "EHLO mail-gg0-f175.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753772Ab3EDUTH (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 May 2013 16:19:07 -0400 Received: by mail-gg0-f175.google.com with SMTP id k6so430400ggd.20 for ; Sat, 04 May 2013 13:19:06 -0700 (PDT) Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Hello all, Commit a85f8350 (http://goo.gl/aCykm) makes it impossible to fsck an ext4 filesystem w/ external journal if it is mounted read-only. Certain distros (Gentoo in my case) expect to be able to do this on the root filesystem at boot time, and get very upset if they can't. With journal checks forced now, e2fsck tries to open() the external journal device, which always fails with -EBUSY if the filesystem is mounted, read-only or otherwise. Is this the expected behavior? Maybe the kernel shouldn't be returning an error there? It's been doing so since at least v3.6. Clearly this doesn't impact many people, since it's been in the tree for almost a year now... but I thought I'd mention it. Thoughts? Thanks very much, Calvin