On Wed, 26 Feb 2003, der Mouse wrote:

> > I don't know if there actually is an fsck_xfs, so using the journal
> > is important. :-)
>
> There is and there isn't.  Back when I worked with IRIX, it didn't come
> with any XFS fsck-alike "because you don't need it with xfs".
>
> Well, as I'm sure you all know, there are ways other than crashes to
> damage file systems, and some of them can damage XFS filesystems.  One
> of those happened to us, once, and upon getting sufficiently upset at
> SGI, they coughed up an XFS fsck.
>
> Presumably other XFS implementations will have one, if only for the
> sake of sanity.

I remember this being the case when I first started using XFS under IRIX
6.2 back in the mid 1990s (late 1995?).  There was a certain amount of
arrogance shown on the part of SGI, not releasing XFS with any
filesystem repair tools. Of course we, as did many other people, found
some problems with this.  I think there were still a few bugs to be
shaken out of XFS at the time, and within a few months, there was a
patch for IRIX 6.2 which included an xfs_repair utility and maybe a few
others.  Looking at our IRIX 6.5 systems here, they all come with
xfs_check and xfs_repair utils.

Still, I must say that since early 1997 or so, I've seen thousands of
hard reboots of IRIX systems. (Generally users hard resetting their
systems, knocking out power cords, or due to things like facility-wide
power outages.)  I've never once needed to run xfs_repair on any of
those systems.  There was just that one time, after they'd first
introduced XFS in IRIX 6.2.

What's odd is that I even remember reading something very much like your
quote of "because you don't need it with xfs" when I was trying to fix
our corrupted XFS filesystem those many years ago.  Was that in one of
the man pages?  I very clearly remember myself thinking "you stupid
self-confident bastards" when I read it.

-brian.