what workflow creates so many negative dentries?
what workflow creates so many negative dentries?
Posted Jul 4, 2026 11:54 UTC (Sat) by mokki (subscriber, #33200)In reply to: what workflow creates so many negative dentries? by jepler
Parent article: Limiting negative dentries
I saw the soft lockups from negative dentries regularly 15 years ago. It was on a huge (at the time) build machine.
It just repeated endlessly: git checkout, build, rm -rf
Each round left all the files as negative dentries.
And when the system finally ran out of memory it basically locked up for minutes and would not clear most of the dentries.
I had to run a cron job in th background to flush then regularly
It just repeated endlessly: git checkout, build, rm -rf
Each round left all the files as negative dentries.
And when the system finally ran out of memory it basically locked up for minutes and would not clear most of the dentries.
I had to run a cron job in th background to flush then regularly