Subject: Re: FS clean bit, is it reliable?
To: None <greywolf@captech.com>
From: Ken Hornstein <kenh@cmf.nrl.navy.mil>
List: current-users
Date: 11/02/1995 19:06:19
>Sounds like the "clean bit" is the first thing set instead of the last.

Actually, as I recall, it wasn't quite that.  It was the case if you deleted
an executable that never got properly killed before shutdown, _then_ it would
get corrupted.  This was the case with init; since it never really exits (is
that correct?), if you deleted the init executable (say, from doing a "make
install" for world), you'd have a dirty filesystem.

One gross workaround would be to modify the install process for "init" so
it moved init to init.bak, or something similar.  This wouldn't be fixing the
original problem (and it wouldn't work if you did more than one make install),
but it might help remove most occurances of the problem.

Maybe one fix in the case of init might be to do the internal equivalant of
a "close" on the init vnode before the actual shutdown.  For other files, you
could mark filesystems dirty if they had vnodes for processes that wouldn't
die.  I don't know how complicated these tasks are, tho.

--Ken