Re: Removable media management

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 01:30 +0200, Spider wrote:
> Would this perhaps, just maybe, also mean that we can actually fsck
> USB/Firewire devices when inserted instead of seeing nasty kernel
> messages about needing it?

We could and as a matter of fact I recently added the necessary bits to
DKD and gdu to do this

http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-new-fsck-logo.png
http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gdu-fsck.png
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/david/DeviceKit-disks.git;a=commitdiff;h=f4b14aaa912b5ff367018f4de79c1b05a517460d
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/david/gnome-disk-utility.git;a=commitdiff;h=eaee4582461b43151570ba616484a841e9d9828e

However checking a file system can take a long time.. I tried fsck'ing a
250GB SATA disk connected via USB2 with ~150GB data and I think ~5,000
files. It took ~2 minutes. So we probably need to probe for more
information at detection time (e.g. extend vol_id) such as

 - date/time of last file system check
 - number of mounts without fsck
 - whether the file system was cleanly unmounted last time
 - etc.

and this stuff may be file system dependent. Worst case we can always
put up a notification if it takes 5 seconds or longer saying "checking
disk" and allow the user to cancel it if he's in a hurry. However, that
seems pretty wrong.

      David