Hi, I did some memory stress test (allocating and mlock()ing a huge number of pages) from userspace. At the very beginning of that I got that error long before the system got unresponsible and the oom killer dropped in. Eike ============================================= [ INFO: possible recursive locking detected ] kded/5304 is trying to acquire lock: (&inode->i_mutex){--..}, at: [] mutex_lock+0x21/0x24 but task is already holding lock: (&inode->i_mutex){--..}, at: [] mutex_lock+0x21/0x24 other info that might help us debug this: 3 locks held by kded/5304: #0: (&inode->i_mutex){--..}, at: [] mutex_lock+0x21/0x24 #1: (shrinker_rwsem){----}, at: [] shrink_slab+0x25/0x136 #2: (&type->s_umount_key#14){----}, at: [] prune_dcache+0xf6/0x144 stack backtrace: [] show_trace_log_lvl+0x54/0xfd [] show_trace+0xd/0x10 [] dump_stack+0x17/0x1c [] __lock_acquire+0x753/0x99c [] lock_acquire+0x4a/0x6a [] __mutex_lock_slowpath+0xb0/0x1f4 [] mutex_lock+0x21/0x24 [] ntfs_put_inode+0x3b/0x74 [ntfs] [] iput+0x33/0x6a [] dentry_iput+0x5b/0x73 [] prune_one_dentry+0x56/0x79 [] prune_dcache+0x10a/0x144 [] shrink_dcache_memory+0x19/0x31 [] shrink_slab+0xd0/0x136 [] try_to_free_pages+0x129/0x1d5 [] __alloc_pages+0x18e/0x284 [] read_cache_page+0x59/0x131 [] ext2_get_page+0x1c/0x1ff [] ext2_find_entry+0x72/0x139 [] ext2_inode_by_name+0xe/0x2e [] ext2_lookup+0x1f/0x65 [] do_lookup+0xa0/0x134 [] __link_path_walk+0x7a5/0xbe4 [] link_path_walk+0x50/0xca [] do_path_lookup+0x212/0x25a [] __user_walk_fd+0x2d/0x41 [] vfs_stat_fd+0x19/0x40 [] vfs_stat+0x11/0x13 [] sys_stat64+0x14/0x2a [] sysenter_past_esp+0x56/0x8d