Bug 337981

Summary: VFS: Busy inodes after unmount following NFS problems
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Reporter: Bob Gautier <rgautier>
Component: kernelAssignee: Steve Dickson <steved>
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Martin Jenner <mjenner>
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: urgent    
Version: 5.2CC: chet.burgess, dzickus, imcleod, jlayton, sghosh, staubach, steved, tkramer
Target Milestone: rcKeywords: ZStream
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: x86_64   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard: GSSApproved
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2008-01-24 20:51:17 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:    
Bug Blocks: 424251    

Description Bob Gautier 2007-10-18 14:06:42 UTC
Description of problem:

Following some trouble with remote NFS (v3) file systems, the machine crashed
having logged the following message:

VFS: Busy inodes after unmount of 0:1f. Self-destruct in 5 seconds.  Have a nice
day...

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

kernel 2.6.18-8.el5

How reproducible:

This was a single crash, probably provoked by very special circumstances

Steps that led to the crash:

User tries to access a stale NFS mount:

    cd /path1

The user tried to clear the stale mount by unmounting:

    umount /path1

This failed with 'device is busy'.  Locating the processes that were keeping the
stale mount busy, the user tried to kill them, eventually resorting to

    kill -9 pid...

The processes went away and

    umount /path1

succeeeded.  The filesystem was then remounted:

    mount server:/path/to/files /path1

The original job could then be performed, and the file system unmounted:

    cd /path1
    # do stuff...
    umount /path1

Another NFS filesystem was then mounted:

    mount server:/path/to/more/files /path2

Files were written to the /path2 tree without error

Finally, the user did:

    cd /path2/OS/
    createrepo ... 

At this point, the machine crashed.  We don't know when the 'have a nice day'
message was logged relative to the crash.

Comment 6 RHEL Program Management 2007-11-21 18:46:00 UTC
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in a Red
Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release.  Product Management has requested
further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for potential
inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update release for currently deployed
products.  This request is not yet committed for inclusion in an Update
release.

Comment 14 Don Zickus 2008-01-24 20:51:17 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 253663 ***