Re: ext4: spurious "orphan cleanup on readonly fs" due to remount,ro failing to reset orphan_file structures

From: Tigran Aivazian

Date: Mon Aug 03 2026 - 09:13:50 EST


Hi,

On Mon, 3 Aug 2026 at 13:36, Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> No need to, the behavior didn't change for a long time. In fact, any
> read-only mount with orphan_file feature enabled will result in the
> spurious "orphan cleanup on readonly fs" message. I've just checked that.
> It is only a cosmetic problem but nobody noticed so far.

You say it is a cosmetic problem, but here I somewhat disagree.
Logically, seeing "orphan cleanup on readonly fs" implies an unclean
shutdown that caused those orphans. Consequently, I spent time
debugging it by instrumenting scripts in
/usr/lib/systemd/system-shutdown/ and even suspecting the NVMe
controller caches, etc. Any sysadmin who doesn't like leaving
"mysteries" on their Linux host would have done the same.

Kind regards,
Tigran