Comment 19 for bug 38303

Jonathon: looks interesting. I will put my question to you again (are you an fsck expert?) Do you know whether it would at least in theory be possible to run part of fsck on a live filesystem, and only to run the rest at boot/shutdown time? I am thinking of something like the following: fsck runs in the background in read-only mode on the file system, while the user is doing other work. Due to the fact that the filesystem is in use, certain errors will be flagged which are not in fact errors. Next time fsck runs on boot/shutdown, it only does a limited check to see whether the errors which it picked up during its live run are really errors or just false positives.

I could imagine that some (but not all) types of fsck errors could be sensibly screened for in this way, but then again, I am not an expert, and do think that someone might have implemented this if it were really as simple as I picture it.