You might try this approach instead, which just removes the thing that might deadlock and always is unfair.. (Ugh, I hate attachements, but the system I'm sending this from has this broken version of 'pine' that will mess up white-space). For nicer interactive behaviour while flushing things out, the inode_fsync() thing should really use "write_locked_buffers()". That's a separate patch, though. Linus