Linux Kernel Daily: VFS Reclaim, Pipe Simplification, and Mount Races
The VFS fixes merge dominates the day, fixing unreclaimable inodes that caused OOM kills, closing mount-versus-eviction races, and removing pipe buffer stealing. LoongArch and crypto fixes round out a stability-focused cycle aimed at 7.4 and 7.3 stable.
Duration: PT2M30S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Linux Kernel Daily.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Linux Kernel Daily
- Published: 2026-11-12T06:01:08Z
- Audio duration: PT2M30S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good morning, it's Thursday, November 12th, 2026, and this is Linux Kernel Daily.
The big signal is the virtual filesystem layer plugging resource leaks that pinned memory and mounts, while simplifying how pipes hand off data.
First, inode reclaim. Since version 7.3, ext2, ext4 without a journal, fat, udf and minix set a metadata writeback flag when copying an inode to its buffer, only cleared by fsync. The shrinker skipped those inodes expecting them to return to the reclaim list, but nothing returned them. On ext4 without a journal, a…
Second, pipe buffer stealing is gone. Only fuse and virtio console used the try-steal path to take pages directly from pipes instead of copying, which pulled page cache pages out of their files and needed repeated fixes. Both now always copy, as they already did on failure. The gift and move flags for splice are…
Third, races and hardening. A mount marking operation racing directory invalidation could leave a mount unreachable, with 151 of 200 bind mounts lost in a 3,000-level deep fuse test. Related fixes make unmount wait for racing eviction of idle roots. For security, namespace IDs are now allocated before the namespace…
Also notable: LoongArch…
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