The inode numbers can easily grow past the "maximum", but once it reaches
the maximum the growth should be stunted and controlled. The above is
exactly the kind of behaviour you should expect: inodes freely grow until
they hit the max number, and then the growth should slow down quite
noticeably. Think of "max" as a soft limit rather than a hard one.
The thing is, that inodes are so critical that having a hard limit for
them can result in serious problems (and the machine dies completely). In
2.0.x, for example, when this happened the machine usually died and
printed out a kernel message like "No more inodes, contact Linus", and too
many people have...
Linus
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