It was brought to my attention that following series of events would cause an infinite loop in the 2.4 nfs kernels. 1) Mount the fileystem with acregmin=1,acregmax=1 from two clients. 2) On client 1, create a process that continuously writes to a file. 3) On client 2, remove that file that is being written 4) On client 1, interrupted out of the writing process (which is failing with ESTALEs) and type sync The sync process loops in wait_on_locked(), when called from sync_inodes_sb(), since the "broken" inode can not be cleared from the locked inode list. This patch sets the NFS_INO_STALE bit in write path (via nfs_writeback_done) which breaks the inode is early enough to stop it from being added to the that list. Comments? steved.