http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11688 tytso@xxxxxxx changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- AssignedTo|fs_ext4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|fs_ext3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Component|ext4 |ext3 ------- Comment #7 from tytso@xxxxxxx 2009-01-18 18:28 ------- So you only have 2 megabytes of memory.... Yeah, this sounds like a low-memory pressure situation. Ext4's delayed allocation will definitely use more memory, and it looks like you are tickling an ext3 memory pressure bug. Is there a reason why you aren't mounting your filesystems with noatime? That's undoubtedly responsible for the ext3 journal activity, and I suspect mounting /home with noatime will make the problem go away. It might also be interesting disabling quotas on /home, to see if the problem goes away or moves to something else. What is happening is that when ext4 starts writing, it needs memory for the page cache. To get that space, the VM system is trying to get space, so it calls among other things, shrink_icache_memory, to shrink the inode cache, which then calls clear_inode, which ended up calling ext3_dquot_drop, through the quota code. Ext3_dquot_drop() calls journal_start(), which then trips over a sanity check. In any case, given what you've told me, I'm even more convinced this is an ext3 and/or a quota system bug, which is getting triggered to severe memory pressure caused by ext4 and the fact that you have a very tiny amount of memory. -- Configure bugmail: http://bugzilla.kernel.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug, or are watching the assignee. -- 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