Re: [PATCH] XFS: Don't flush stale inodes

Christoph Hellwig
2010-01-02T12:00:05Z

On Sat, Jan 02, 2010 at 01:39:40PM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> Because inodes remain in cache much longer than inode buffers do
> under memory pressure, we can get the situation where we have stale,
> dirty inodes being reclaimed but the backing storage has been freed.
> Hence we should never, ever flush XFS_ISTALE inodes to disk as
> there is no guarantee that the backing buffer is in cache and
> still marked stale when the flush occurs.

We should not flush stale inodes. But how do we even end up calling
xfs_iflush with a stale inode?