I've been looking at a case where many threads are opening, unlinking, and hardlinking files on ext3 . At unmount time I see an oops, because the superblock's orphan list points to a freed inode. I did some tracing of the inodes, and it looks like this: ext3_unlink():[/src/linux-2.6.18/fs/ext3/namei.c:2123] adding orphan i_state:0x7 cpu:1 i_count:2 i_nlink:0 ext3_orphan_add():[/src/linux-2.6.18/fs/ext3/namei.c:1890] ext3_orphan_add i_state:0x7 cpu:1 i_count:2 i_nlink:0 iput():[/src/linux-2.6.18/fs/inode.c:1139] iput enter i_state:0x7 cpu:1 i_count:2 i_nlink:0 ext3_link():[/src/linux-2.6.18/fs/ext3/namei.c:2202] ext3_link enter i_state:0x7 cpu:3 i_count:1 i_nlink:0 ext3_inc_count():[/src/linux-2.6.18/fs/ext3/namei.c:1627] done i_state:0x7 cpu:3 i_count:1 i_nlink:1 The unlink gets there first, finds i_count > 0 (in use) but nlink goes to 0, so it puts it on the orphan inode list. Then link comes along, and bumps the link back up to 1. So now we are on the orphan inode list, but we are not unlinked. Eventually when count goes to 0, and we still have 1 link, again no action is taken to remove the inode from the orphan list, because it is still linked (i.e. we don't go through ext3_delete()) When this inode is eventually freed, the sb orphan list gets corrupted, because we have freed it without first removing it from the orphan list. I think the simple solution is to remove the inode from the orphan list when we bump the link back up from 0 to 1. I put that test in there because there are other potential reasons that we might be on the list (truncates, direct IO). Comments? Thanks, -Eric p.s. ext3_inc_count and ext3_dec_count seem misnamed, have an unused arg, and are very infrequently called. I'll probably submit a patch to just put the single line of code into the caller, too. --- Remove inode from the orphan list in ext3_link() if we might have raced with ext3_unlink(), which potentially put it on the list. If we're on the list with nlink > 0, we'll never get cleaned up properly and eventually may corrupt the list. Signed-off-by: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@xxxxxxxxxx> Index: linux-2.6.19/fs/ext3/namei.c =================================================================== --- linux-2.6.19.orig/fs/ext3/namei.c +++ linux-2.6.19/fs/ext3/namei.c @@ -2204,6 +2204,9 @@ retry: inode->i_ctime = CURRENT_TIME_SEC; ext3_inc_count(handle, inode); atomic_inc(&inode->i_count); + /* did we race w/ unlink? */ + if (inode->i_nlink == 1) + ext3_orphan_del(handle, inode); err = ext3_add_nondir(handle, dentry, inode); ext3_journal_stop(handle); - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html