Orphan nodes in an ext4 file system

[Bill Crawford]

On 07/04/2008, Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> wrote:
> Clyde E. Kunkel wrote:
>
> >  I am seeing these randomly after what appears to be a clean shutdown,
> i.e., menu shutdown or restart.  Not seeing them at all on test sequences
> where restart comes very soon after startup.  They seem to appear only after
> a session where I use a lot of different programs for  couple of hours.  I
> frequently use thunderbird, firefox and some kde programs like konqueror,
> kwrite and k3b.  I also use the cli to use system utilities from a gnome
> terminal like the various system-config- programs and basic system status
> checks.  I have looked in the messages log but don't see anything that
> points to a bad shutdown.
> >
>
>  I see them also, usually after I notice a service failed to shutdown
> though... to be honest I haven't paid the orphan inodes much attention yet.
> I'll try to watch what is happening on those more closely.  They definitely
> do show up (en masse) when my virtual machine hangs and I hard reset it.

It's possible for a number of reasons, and I've seen it after quite a
few updates. In particular anything that affects libraries used by
init; libse*, etc. Used to be easy to cause by prelinking and not
running "init u" at some point, too. If you have prelinking enabled,
that could be it.