Re: ext4: spurious "orphan cleanup on readonly fs" due to remount,ro failing to reset orphan_file structures

Tigran Aivazian <[email protected]> Mon, 3 Aug 2026 13:57:55 +0100

Newsgroups	org.kernel.vger.linux-ext4,org.kernel.vger.linux-fsdevel,org.kernel.vger.linux-kernel
Message-ID	<CAK+_RLkvc3b0vC7SHygRv+4xdk_mC-362T60NbtQT4Zmpp6fxg@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

On Mon, 3 Aug 2026 at 13:36, Jan Kara <[email protected]> wrote:
> No need to, the behavior didn't change for a long time. In fact, any
> read-only mount with orphan_file feature enabled will result in the
> spurious "orphan cleanup on readonly fs" message. I've just checked that.
> It is only a cosmetic problem but nobody noticed so far.

You say it is a cosmetic problem, but here I somewhat disagree.
Logically, seeing "orphan cleanup on readonly fs" implies an unclean
shutdown that caused those orphans. Consequently, I spent time
debugging it by instrumenting scripts in
/usr/lib/systemd/system-shutdown/ and even suspecting the NVMe
controller caches, etc. Any sysadmin who doesn't like leaving
"mysteries" on their Linux host would have done the same.

Kind regards,
Tigran