Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 6th Nov 2009 23:42 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
"There is a discussion at osnews.com about a simple question: "Should ZFS Have a fsck Tool?". The answer is simple: No. I could stop now, as this answer is pretty obvious when you work a while with ZFS, but i want to explain my position. And i want to ask a different question at the end."
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Member since:
2005-07-11
Another way to look at it is to ask whether or not LVM needs an fsck, since that's the layer in the ZFS storage system that's being worked on.
ZFS filesystems themselves rarely need fixing (I've never come across one, and haven't read about any online, but I've only been using ZFS for a year). They take care of that automatically using self-healing via checksums and redundancy, transactions, and copy-on-write.
The storage pool could become unimportable, but was usually fixable via arcane voodoo magic commands. Now, it's made a lot simpler (via the code implemented in the PSARC mentioned above -- PSARC is like a support case, or bug report, in Sun-speak).
There are tools for fixing LVM, though. And now there are tools to fix things at the storage pool layer in ZFS.
Asking for "fsck" doesn't make sense, though, as that's the wrong layer in the stack.