Re: 2.6.16-rc6-mm1 (NFS tree ... busy inodes ... relatively harmless)

From: Neil Brown
Date: Sun Mar 12 2006 - 23:38:07 EST


On Sunday March 12, akpm@xxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> - The NFS tree is a bit sick - you may see the `busy inodes - self destruct
> in five seconds" message when performing NFS unmounts. It seems relatively
> harmless.

I think the term is "mostly harmless" ... see the entry for "Earth" in
The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy... :-)

I don't believe this is harmless at all, and I have an oops to prove
it - though it is with NFSv4 which is still EXPERIMENTAL.

I don't believe it is an NFS bug at all, but a VFS bug. It happens
more with NFS because iput on nfs can be a lot slower due to the
required network activity, so the race is easier to hit.

See the
Fix shrink_dcache_parent() against shrink_dcache_memory() race
threads.

Of course there could be other bugs...

NeilBrown
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