Bug 272833 - System becomes unbootable if fstab contains a ext2 entry which is marked dirty
Summary: System becomes unbootable if fstab contains a ext2 entry which is marked dirty
Status: New
Alias: None
Product: Base System
Classification: Unclassified
Component: kern (show other bugs)
Version: Unspecified
Hardware: Any Any
: --- Affects Only Me
Assignee: freebsd-bugs (Nobody)
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2023-07-30 23:10 UTC by Patrick McMunn
Modified: 2023-08-01 19:30 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description Patrick McMunn 2023-07-30 23:10:02 UTC 
I multiboot with Windows 10, Gentoo Linux, and FreeBSD. I have a second drive formatted to ext4 for storage, and I have an fstab entry for that second drive. I added an /etc/fstab entry for that secondary drive on my FreeBSD system. For whatever reason, it was marked dirty. When I booted into FreeBSD, it froze during the boot process when it tried to mount that drive.

The only immediate solution for me to successfully boot into FreeBSD was for me to reboot into single-user mode, edit the fstab to comment out that entry, and reboot into FreeBSD.

The longer-term solution was to reboot into Gentoo and run fsck because FreeBSD's fsck would not deal with the problem.

Frankly, I think that if FreeBSD is going to offer support for ext2/3/4 filesystems, it's fsck should also support those filesystems. And I'm sure those developers would help if asked.

I realize that introducing support to fsck will be work. But, in the interim, mounting failures should fail with very clear and vocal error messages about why the boot process failed. As it is, the boot process simply froze with no messages whatsoever. It was simply a lucky guess, on my part, to figure out why the boot process halted.

Request: At MINIMUM, add informative messages to why the boot process failed. Next, add fsck support to ext2/3/4 filesystems. Finally, perhaps allow mounting to fail, with descriptive error messages, and allow the boot process to continue.