I forgot to add... I thought to use debugfs to "dump" a couple of directories that cause the errors. In each case there was a single 4096 byte block which "od -c" displays as: 0000000 8 5 7 2 \n \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 0000020 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 * 0010000 in one case and 0000000 / d e v / p t s / 2 \n \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 0000020 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 * 0010000 in the other. The newline on the end has me stumped (not that I can particularly explain the rest). I will see if any more appear over night, and then boot back to 2.4.17-pre2+ I should also add that this machine is an NFS fileserver, and the 2.4.18 kernel that I was using had some enhancements like reduction of BKL usage in NFSd, so it's possible that the problem is not in ext3... I will review the BKL stuff again tomorrow. NeilBrown
