Re: "Busy inodes after unmount. Self destruct in 5 seconds..."

[Chris Walker <cwalker@pixar.com>]

We have this problem as well. The problem occurs during unmount, so we
reduced the number of unmounts by adding a high --timeout (86400) to
automount. This worked in our case because we have a (relatively) small
number of filesystems that are accessed frequently.

This may not be an option in your case as you are accessing many
filesystems.

From rprach:
> Dear Folks,
> 
> I am administrating a set of Linux servers that use automount and amd in 
> order to access a variety of NFS volumes. The servers are, for the most 
> part, running kernel 2.4.25 (but see below). We are using the kernel 
> automounter version 3 and the userspace automount binary v3.1.7. 
> 
> We have a script that accesses resources all over the network. To this 
> end, it mounts, via autofs, a large number of remote filesystems. Whenever 
> this script is run, the following alarming message appears in the system 
> log:
> 
> kernel: VFS: Busy inodes after unmount. Self-destruct in 5 seconds.  Have 
> a nice day...
> 
> I searched the mailing list of this archive and found some threads from 
> September of last year which seem to detail the same problem, however, no 
> solution or workaround was proposed at that time.
> 
> Looking at kernel.org, I see that kernel 2.4.26-pre3 contains a patch that 
> is supposed to help fix this problem. This patch was duly applied, but the 
> message persists. 
> 
> Questions: What is causing this message? Is there anything I can do about 
> it? Is there anything I should be doing about it, or is it an alarming yet 
> irrelevant message? 
> 
> Any insight you could shed would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Yours Truly,
> 
> Raymond Prach
> _______________________________________________
> autofs mailing list
> autofs@linux.kernel.org
> http://linux.kernel.org/mailman/listinfo/autofs


-- 
Chris Walker
Render Pipeline Group
Pixar Animation Studios
510/752.3736
cwalker@pixar.com