id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc
2189	cleanfs may not clean /var files when system clock is localtime	dnicholson@…	DJ Lucas	"Continuation from #2160. The cleanfs script checks if files are older than /proc before removing them /var/run and /var/lock. However, /proc is mounted before the system clock is synced from the hardware clock in the clock script. This can cause the modification time of /proc to be inaccurate, especially when the hardware clock is in localtime and the time on /proc will be the offset from UTC.

This can cause files in /var to be from a previous boot to appear to be newer than /proc, and they will not be removed by cleanfs. For either pid or lock files, you will have stale files which confuse the other bootscripts.

There are two possible solutions:

1. Don't use a marker file at all. I noticed that on Fedora they just reap everything in /var/run and /var/lock during sysinit. One drawback would be that no processes could write to those directories before cleanfs, but that shouldn't be a problem if cleanfs is ordered right after mountfs. Since /var isn't guaranteed to be mounted until mountfs, you wouldn't lose anything.

2. Choose a different marker file. I think that /etc/mtab is a good candidate. Again, if you put cleanfs right after mountfs, that's the first time /var is guaranteed to be writable. And /etc/mtab is updated during mountfs, so you would be sure that everything older than mtab is from a previous boot. However, if you run cleanfs sometime after boot, that's criteria is probably not accurate anymore.

I'd personally rather go with 1."	defect	closed	normal	6.4	Bootscripts	SVN	normal	fixed	bootscripts