A Catch-22 of BOOTing with fsck

[iam070]

Two nights ago, after completing the routine update of Manjaro, I restarted my computer. As the Manjaro loading screen flashed by, the boot process halted, and a spell-like message appeared on the screen:

“ERROR: Bailing out. Run ‘fsck UUID=xxxxxxx’ manually.”

I followed the prompt and ran fsck UUID=xxxx, but the result showed:

/dev/nvmexxx has unsupported feature(s): FEATURE_C12

e2fsck: Get a newer version of e2fsck!

It looks like there’s a disk issue. I switched to an Ubuntu system installed on another partition, and it booted smoothly into the GNOME desktop. I ran fsck UUID=xxxx again, and guess what? No errors were found—the partition appeared completely normal. It seemed fixed.

But when I rebooted and tried to enter Manjaro, I was still greeted with the same error:
ERROR: Bailing out. Run “fsck UUID”

What the heck?

Wait, don’t rush—I just remembered! When a disk exceeds a certain number of mounts, Linux automatically runs fsck during boot, right? So the issue must lie in this forced fsck process!

I removed the ‘quiet’ parameter from the kernel boot options and restarted Manjaro. Sure enough, the screen showed that fsck failed due to unsupported ‘FEATURE_C12’.

Aha! Got you, you little troublemaker!

Now that we’ve identified the problem, I need to either disable FEATURE_C12 or try upgrading fsck?

Wow, I’m just stuck in a Catch-22 where fsck can’t run because of FEATURE_C12, yet the system insists on running fsck.

[andreas85]

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[Nachlese]

@iam070

FEATURE_C12

I googled for just this expression:
FEATURE_C12

The very first result seems relevant.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1497523/feature-c12-e2fsck-get-a-newer-version-of-e2fsck

A suitable version of fsck should be available in the initrd, but apparently it is not.
cave: apparently …

Just as you can disable the feature with

tune2fs -O ^orphan_file /dev/device

to get the check done and the file system clean,

you can re-enable it later.
(or maybe not, I can’t interpret / don’t understand the ramifications of the second comment there)

To be on the safe (and: current) side, I’d prepare a Ventoy USB stick with a very recent Arch or Manjaro ISO on it and boot that - instead of Ubuntu.
But Ubuntu doesn’t seem to choke on that feature, while Manjaro apparently can’t handle it,
so: strange …

I have had a similar thing “happen” to me, when I was trying to access/check a file system that was created by Arch with features which where not (by default) supported by the Debian derivative I was trying to use.
… but not the other way around, as it appears to be here

---

Ubuntu/Mint creates ext4 file systems by default with these features:
Filesystem features: has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index filetype needs_recovery extent 64bit flex_bg sparse_super large_file huge_file dir_nlink extra_isize metadata_csum

Arch/Manjaro by default creates ext4 file systems with this feature set:
Filesystem features: has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index orphan_file filetype needs_recovery extent 64bit flex_bg metadata_csum_seed sparse_super large_file huge_file dir_nlink extra_isize metadata_csum orphan_present

obtained through:
sudo tune2fs -l /dev/device | grep features