[PLUG] Orphaned inodes

[Frank Filz]

> > Hmm, the crash must be causing open but unlinked inodes to be lost,
> 
> Frank,
> 
> I assume this is the case. When the system reboots (and it's been >200
days) the
> kernel forces a filesystem check (it's ext3 on this host).
> 
> The reason I asked is curiosity what, other than a system crash, could
cause
> inodes to become orphaned.

Other than a crash or a code bug, I can't think of any reason. Even if a
process that holds an open file descriptor on an unlinked file crashes, the
kernel will still clean up all the open file descriptors for that process,
which will prompt releasing any inodes with a link count of 0 that now no
longer have any open file descriptors anchoring them.

EXT3 journaling should handle all the system crash cases. Ok, it maybe
doesn't handle all crashes - I was just reading up on it...

e2fsck does the journal replay after a crash, so it's reporting orphaned
inodes may just be part of journal replay.

Frank