System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems

Inodes

The list of inodes is checked sequentially starting with inode 2. (Inode 0 and inode 1 are reserved). Each inode is checked for inconsistencies in the following:

Format and Type of Inodes

Each inode contains a mode word, which describes the type and state of the inode. Inodes might be one of nine types:

Inodes might be in one of three states:

When the file system is created, a fixed number of inodes are set aside. However, these inodes are not allocated until they are needed. An allocated inode is one that points to a file. An unallocated inode does not point to a file and, therefore, should be empty. The partially allocated state means that the inode is incorrectly formatted. An inode can get into this state if, for example, bad data is written into the inode list because of a hardware failure. The only corrective action the fsck command can take is to clear the inode.

Link Count Checks

Each inode contains a count of the number of directory entries linked to it. The fsck command verifies the link count of each inode by examining the entire directory structure, starting from the root (/) directory, and calculating an actual link count for each inode.

Discrepancies between the link count stored in the inode and the actual link count as determined by the fsck command might be one of three types:

Duplicate Block Checks

Each inode contains a list, or pointers to lists (indirect blocks), of all the blocks claimed by the inode. Because indirect blocks are owned by an inode, inconsistencies in indirect blocks directly affect the inode that owns the indirect block.

The fsck command compares each block number claimed by an inode to a list of allocated blocks. If another inode already claims a block number, the block number is put on a list of duplicate blocks. Otherwise, the list of allocated blocks is updated to include the block number.

If duplicate blocks are found, the fsck command makes a second pass of the inode list to find the other inode that claims each duplicate block. The fsck command cannot determine with certainty which inode is in error. So, the fsck command prompts you to choose which inode should be kept and which inode should be cleared. Note that a large number of duplicate blocks in an inode might be caused by an indirect block not being written to the file system.

Bad Block Number Checks

The fsck command checks each block number claimed by an inode to determine whether its value is higher than the value of the first data block and lower than that of the last data block in the file system. If the block number is outside this range, it is considered a bad block number.

Bad block numbers in an inode might be caused by an indirect block not being written to the file system. The fsck command prompts you to clear the inode.

Inode Size Checks

Each inode contains a count of the number of data blocks that it references. The number of actual data blocks is the sum of the allocated data blocks and the indirect blocks. The fsck command computes the number of data blocks and compares that block count against the number of blocks that the inode claims. If an inode contains an incorrect count, the fsck command prompts you to fix it.

Each inode contains a 64-bit size field. This field shows the number of characters (data bytes) in the file associated with the inode. A rough check of the consistency of the size field of an inode uses the number of characters shown in the size field to calculate how many blocks should be associated with the inode, and then compares that number to the actual number of blocks claimed by the inode.