VFS: No free inodes - contact Linus

H. Peter Anvin (harold@rastamon.local.org)
Mon, 15 Dec 1997 18:42:09 +0800 (SGT)


Hi,

I got the above error, which, I have on good authority, "cannot
happen".

The machine hung up, I did a hard reboot. There is nothing in the
logs, no stack dump, nothing.

Kernel version is 2.0.32, patched for the overlap bug only,
otherwise stock.

There were a few programs running which together may have
precipitated the message. One is a program of my own devising, that
indexes my (30 meg) news spool. It opens and mmaps each article file
-serially- (then closes and munmaps). Also running was lynx, and a
Perl cgi script which queried an nntpd (also written by me), which
was probably going through the same news spool at the same time.

-harold