Hmm, thinking I'd better just take a hammer to this inotify problem despite the fact I cannot confirm the root cause of the warning messages. Possibilities include the race being fixed here, and races in the debug code itself. -- There is a race between setting an inode's children's "parent watched" flag when placing the first watch on a parent, and instantiating new children of that parent: a child could miss having its flags set by set_dentry_child_flags, but then inotify_d_instantiate might still see !inotify_inode_watched. The solution is to set_dentry_child_flags after adding the watch. Locking is taken care of, because both set_dentry_child_flags and inotify_d_instantiate hold dcache_lock and child->d_locks. Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@xxxxxxx> --- Index: linux-2.6/fs/inotify.c =================================================================== --- linux-2.6.orig/fs/inotify.c +++ linux-2.6/fs/inotify.c @@ -627,6 +627,7 @@ s32 inotify_add_watch(struct inotify_han struct inode *inode, u32 mask) { int ret = 0; + int newly_watched; /* don't allow invalid bits: we don't want flags set */ mask &= IN_ALL_EVENTS | IN_ONESHOT; @@ -653,12 +654,18 @@ s32 inotify_add_watch(struct inotify_han */ watch->inode = igrab(inode); - if (!inotify_inode_watched(inode)) - set_dentry_child_flags(inode, 1); - /* Add the watch to the handle's and the inode's list */ + newly_watched = !inotify_inode_watched(inode); list_add(&watch->h_list, &ih->watches); list_add(&watch->i_list, &inode->inotify_watches); + /* + * Set child flags _after_ adding the watch, so there is no race + * windows where newly instantiated children could miss their parent's + * watched flag. + */ + if (newly_watched) + set_dentry_child_flags(inode, 1); + out: mutex_unlock(&ih->mutex); mutex_unlock(&inode->inotify_mutex); - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html