"VFS: no free inodes - contact Linus"

David Luyer (luyer@ucs.uwa.edu.au)
Thu, 16 Oct 1997 15:41:58 +0800 (WST)


I've got inode-max set to 32768 and running 2.0.30 I got the 'VFS: no free
inodes - contact Linus' scrolling down the UWA news server screen
hundreds/thousands/millions of times making it unusable and unrebootable,
I had to hard boot it.

System is PPro200 w/BusLogic958C, 192M RAM, 6G or so MD'd news spool
partition. Came up with a lot [hundreds] of deleted inode has zero dtime,
maybe was doing a fastrm(news expire pass) when it crashed?

Since file-max is 4096 and inode-max is 32768 (inode-nr is normally
16-20k), I guess that means it had to go thru the code path
nr_inodes<max_inodes && grow_inodes() != 0, ie, got an ENOMEM trying to
grow_inodes(). Is this the problem? Is there a solution? (just using the
"best" from before when grow_inodes() fails would look like an obvious
one...)

David.