/etc/mtab should not be a symlink

[magius@…]

/etc/mtab is currently being symlinked to /proc/mounts. This causes problems with applications that watch mtab. KDE for example loses performance becuase it will continually report that the /etc/mtab file is a dirty file. Once I changed the file to a static file in /etc it worked much better and KDE stopped complaining. Is there a possibility this could be changed in future version of LFS? The KDE Mailing list repeated gets complaints on this. Below I've attached one of the emails I received from the KDE Devel team regarding this problem. ---<SNIP>---

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As long as LFS, doesn't use a real MTAB, but a link to /proc/mounts I see no real way to fix that. I've tried to do my best, to reduce the performance problem, but since proc doesn't know about mtime :(

What you can do is disable the devices:/ view on kdesktop in the desktop settings and edit in $(KDEPREFIX)/share/services/kded/mountwatcher.desktop the line X-KDE-Kded-autoload=true to look like X-KDE-Kded-autoload=false

I don't think about /etc/mtab being a symlink. Actually it was quite easy to fix once you pointed me to the symlink. I dropped to single user mode (ie. telinit 1) Killed any othe processes not killed by init so that all I had running was my single bash shell as root. umounted all unneeded filesystems. Deleted symlink in /etc and touched an empty file. Just to test it, I mounted another filesystem and it wrote to the static file. Then in /etc/rc.d/init.d/mountfs I changed: mount -n -o remount,rw / to mount -o remount,rw / And all works fine :) ---<SNIP>--- Regards, Adam Watson

[sk@…]

Patch to implement /etc/mtab file handling in LFS Book and Bootscripts