CompuServe Messages

Are you running BSD, or SYSV? If you're running BSD, you've already got it. It's the "-p" option. (You have to set up a few more thing than that….you'll have to check the man pages). In SYSV (at least the versions before V.4…I'm not sure about V.$), it doesn't exist. I added that to our (the company I work for) implementation of fsck. If you do have SYSV, check for a program called dfsck (I think that's what it's called). The dfsck command let's you run two fsck's in parallel. The implementation I put together doesn't have that restriction. I think we run four or five at a time. There are a couple things to watch out for: 1) Don't run so many in parallel that you start swapping. The whole point of this is to get through the fsck phase as fast as possible, and if you start swapping it defeats the purpose. 2) Only run 1 fsck per disk at one time. If you try and run fsck on two partitions that are on the same disk, you'll end up taking extra time because of extra disk head movement. Since you have two disks, you'd be restricted to two fsck's at a time (Assuming you've got enough memory). There's a bit more involved (handling REALLY large partions that use scratch files instead of a lot of memory, how to optimally arrange the order of disk checking, collating the output from multiple processes), but that's the basic drift. If you've got source for fsck (and you're daring) you can do what I did and add it to the fsck program itself, but I'd say that armed with a program that can check the dirty bit on a partition and a well written shell script, you would be able to roll your own parallel fsck. Steve