Re: ext3 message if FS is not ext3

[Stephen C. Tweedie]

Hi,

On Sat, May 26, 2001 at 10:54:39AM +0100, Steve Dodd wrote:
> On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 01:06:16PM +0100, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> > On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 02:00:13PM +0200, Florian Lohoff wrote:
> 
> > > i think this message should be removed ;)
> [..]
> > > VFS: Can't find an ext3 filesystem on dev fd(2,0).
> 
> > mount(8) tried to get the kernel to mount /dev/fd0 as an ext3
> > filesystem.  The kernel is entitled to emit an error in that case.
> > ext2 will complain too.
> 
> Shouldn't it be doing the mount 'silently' when mount(8) is guessing the
> filesystem type? I'm seeing this too (2.2.19 + ext3 0.0.6b):

That's possible.  There is actually a "silent" parameter passed to the
filesystem mount routines in the kernel.  Unfortunately, it's actually
encoded as a "mount-root" parameter, and it gets used when attempting
the initial root mount when we don't know the filesystem type in
advance.  Ext2/ext3 interpret the mount-root parameter as an
instruction to fail silently, but I'm not sure whether there are other
filesystems which actually use it as a hint to treat the root
differently.  If so, we can't overload that parameter to mean
go-silent.  That's no big deal, we can create a new MS_* flag for
it in that case.

> As the kernel (2.2 or 2.4) doesn't seem to provide a way for userspace to
> request a silent mount, I don't know whose (if anyone's) bug this is.

It's not a bug.  It is a missing feature, perhaps.

Cheers,
 Stephen