I notice that I do not have the file in my system before or after plugging in a usb flashdrive which automounts. I am not yet suggesting any action. But I was wondering what would be the effect of removing mtab.fuselock or renaming it to mtab.fuselock.old, so you can still reinsert it if necessary. I bring it up in case you may find more info about removing it, or in case anyone else already knows if this is advisable.
I was not familiar with mtab.fuselock so I googled and found these bits of info.
ArchLinux: Only / and KernelFS are mounted
I just had the problem that my Arch box didn’t let me log in. I logged in as root, and found out that none of my filesystems where mounted, only / and the various virtual kernel file systems.
The Problem:
After my last session (in which the kernel or something else hang up so I had to do a hard reset), the file /etc/mtab.fuselock existed in the filesystem, so no file system from /etc/fstab could be mounted.
So I just deleted this file, rebooted and it works!
http://malte70.tumblr.com/
and
http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-s ... 01[quote]I finally got a little annoyed about the fusermount -u behavior and
looked into it. The problem is that if I mount my filesystem and then
later use fusermount -u to unmount it, sometimes it would unmount the
filesystem but wouldn't remove the fuse entry from /etc/mtab. [Note
that in version 1.0 release it will corrupt my /etc/mtab -- I had an
early fix that made it into the CVS only after that release].
The problem seems to be that when the filesystem gets notified that it
is being unmounted, it arranges for fusermount to unmount the system, so
there is a race condition where two fusermount programs are running
trying to do the same work.
I'm not sure that either can be eliminated, since they can handle
different cases, but they do need some sort of synchronization.
Attached is a proposed patch which adds an empty /etc/mtab.fuselock
file which is used for locking to stop multiple fusermount instances
from modifying mtab at once. [/quote]