Hello everybody! As I wrote in my mail the previous week ("BUG: 2.4.19pre1 & journal_thread & open filehandles") I followed the problem a little bit further. Here's my patch; I beg the ext3-maintainers (Stephen, Andreas, Andrew) to have a look at it and submit it to Marcelo and Linux for inclusion. (2.4 is for now for me more important than 2.5). Patch ----- On every mount of ext3 (and I suppose all journaling filesystems which use jbd, although I didn't test this) a new kjournald is created. All kjournald share the same file-information. Before this patch it would accumulativly fetch open files from the calling process (normally mount); I verified this via (in bash) exec 30< /etc/services mount <partition> /mnt/tmp ps -aux | grep kjournald ls -la <pid of any kjournald> gives, among 0, 1 and 2 30 -> /etc/services This is really awful as you can't umount devfs (normally /dev/console is opened as from the start-scripts) and so / can't be umounted. After applying this patch the open files were gone. Please apply this patch ASAP - thank you very much. Regards, Phil diff -ru linux/fs/jbd/journal.c linux.ori/fs/jbd/journal.c --- linux/fs/jbd/journal.c Mon Apr 22 06:29:16 2002 +++ linux.ori/fs/jbd/journal.c Mon Apr 22 06:28:54 2002 @@ -204,7 +204,6 @@ lock_kernel(); daemonize(); - exit_files(current); spin_lock_irq(¤t->sigmask_lock); sigfillset(¤t->blocked); recalc_sigpending(current);