Re: Bug with 2.1.122 pre1 and Quota?

Marco van Wieringen (mvw@mars.planets.elm.net)
Mon, 14 Sep 1998 21:18:27 +0200 (MEST)


On 14-Sep-98 at 20:59, Scott Lampert (fortunato@heavymetal.org) wrote:
> I've stumbled across a problem trying to work with quotas with the
> 2.1.122 kernel. While trying to create home directories for a large
> numbers of users on an ext2 fs drive, it keeps bombing out after about 100
> creations with the error:
>
> VFS: No free dquots, contact mvw@planets.elm.net
>
> I don't get a panic or anything, the process just stops. Its way too
> late for me to trouble shoot it any further right now, but if someone would
> like me to do anything in particular to garner any more information, please
> let me know. Thanks,

This behaviour comes from the fact that inodes keep lingering longer
with the newer 2.1.xx kernels.In earlier kernels 2.0.x etc. we didn't
have the now used dcache structs and all inodes were cleared quite soon
after the last iput had taken place. Due to the way the new dcache stuff
works lots of inodes keep lingering which will result in an lingering
dquot (kernel quota structure) for each id used. The problem described
above comes due to the fact that you cycle through all available uid/gid
which will result in large allocations of dquots. The easiest way to get
ride of the messages is increasing the number of concurrent dquots. You
can increase them using the following command somewhere in your bootup:

echo 4096 > /proc/sys/fs/dquot-max

Maybe we should increase the default upper limit or purge the inode cache
faster for inodes opened for writing. (This problem only occurs on inodes
(files) which are opened for writing.)

Marco van Wieringen

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