Hugo Mills posted on Mon, 23 Dec 2013 09:39:53 +0000 as excerpted: > On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 10:27:17PM -0800, Nacho Man wrote: >> I ran dmesg and saw a bunch of these: >> [564421.874063] BTRFS debug (device sda2): unlinked 32 orphans >> >> Do I have to worry? > No, this is harmless. Orphans are files that were deleted while > they were still held open by a process. POSIX semantics requires that > the file data is still readable by the process, but that the file's > hardlink(s) are no longer visible -- so there's no way of finding the > file again by "normal" methods. Once the process closes the file, it is > unlinked. Cool. I knew delete worked that way on POSIX filesystems[1], and I'd seen various posts on this list with unlinking X orphans logs, but I had no idea /that/ was what orphans referred too! New logical connection made. Thanks. =:^) > With btrfs, making a snapshot of a subvolume with (still open) > orphan files in it will close the orphans on the new copy, because > they're new files. This leads to the messages above. ... And that's entirely logical, once one actually knows what "orphans" are! =:^) --- [1] Someone posted a script to the gentoo-dev list at one point, that can be run after an update to go thru /proc and list the processes that have open but deleted files... because they've been replaced in the update. That way, an admin can see what still-running apps still have outdated and possibly vulnerable libraries loaded, and can choose to restart those apps, or leave them running, or look a bit closer at what libs that process depends on that were updated and why, before choosing to restart that process, as appropriate based on the risk factor for that process vs whether it's doing something important that can't be interrupted without losing data. Using that tool and seeing just what tends to need restarted after an update as well as how frequently, is what really drove home the principle here, but I didn't know what those deleted-but-still- open files were called, until your explanation just now. =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
