Over the last several year or so, we've gotten several reports of this sort of warning message popping up: [34011.669912] ------------[ cut here ]------------ [34011.670473] WARNING: at fs/dcache.c:2630 prepend_path+0x1eb/0x200() [34011.671198] Hardware name: Bochs [34011.671564] Root dentry has weird name <> vfsmnt: fs:nfs4 [34011.672195] Modules linked in: nfsv4 auth_rpcgss nfs lockd sunrpc dns_resolver fscache kvm_amd kvm microcode virtio_net virtio_balloon i2c_piix4 cirrus drm_kms_helper ttm virtio_blk drm i2c_core [34011.674464] Pid: 7470, comm: ls Tainted: G W 3.7.0-6.fc19.x86_64 #1 [34011.675417] Call Trace: [34011.675712] [<ffffffff8106892f>] warn_slowpath_common+0x7f/0xc0 [34011.676404] [<ffffffff81068a26>] warn_slowpath_fmt+0x46/0x50 [34011.677058] [<ffffffff8109eb24>] ? lg_local_lock+0x44/0x80 [34011.677675] [<ffffffff811e8f18>] ? prepend_path+0x38/0x200 [34011.678315] [<ffffffff811e90cb>] prepend_path+0x1eb/0x200 [34011.678926] [<ffffffff811e913c>] path_with_deleted+0x5c/0xa0 [34011.679578] [<ffffffff811e976f>] d_path+0xbf/0x100 [34011.680139] [<ffffffff81244bb5>] proc_pid_readlink+0x95/0x100 [34011.680783] [<ffffffff811d8509>] sys_readlinkat+0xa9/0xc0 [34011.681418] [<ffffffff81104a5c>] ? __audit_syscall_entry+0xcc/0x300 [34011.682144] [<ffffffff811d853b>] sys_readlink+0x1b/0x20 [34011.682740] [<ffffffff816fbd19>] system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b [34011.683425] ---[ end trace 5e8c789abf4f6e53 ]--- This warning was added in commit 98dc568bc. I've found a way to trigger this at will: Mount up a nfs mount and cd into it from a shell. Do a lazy umount of the mount, and then do this from the shell: $ ls -l /proc/self/cwd That will cause that warning message to fire. The mnt will be detached and will look like the global root, but the d_name.name will be a zero-length string. I'm pretty sure there are other ways to trigger this too -- maybe involving races with shrinkable mounts (not sure on this). My initial thought was to add "(unreachable)" to the string, a'la d_path_with_unreachable(), but the changelog on commit 7b2a69ba70 made me think that that's not such a good idea. Given that this is fairly easy to reproduce, is there any point in keeping this warning around or should we just remove it? -- Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx> -- 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