Yeah, the patch doesn't work at all. I looked at one call tree and it is: hfs_mdb_get() tries to allocate HFS_SB(sb)->ext_tree. HFS_SB(sb)->ext_tree = hfs_btree_open(sb, HFS_EXT_CNID, hfs_ext_keycmp); ^^^^^^^^ hfs_btree_open() calls page = read_mapping_page(mapping, 0, NULL); read_mapping_page() calls mapping->a_ops->readpage() which leads to hfs_readpage() which leads to hfs_ext_read_extent() which calls res = hfs_find_init(HFS_SB(inode->i_sb)->ext_tree, &fd); ^^^^^^^^ So we need ->ext_tree to be non-NULL before we can set ->ext_tree to be non-NULL... :/ I wonder how long this has been broken and if we should just delete the AFS file system. regards, dan carpenter