What means "Inode #10 was a directory with children" ?

[Steven Scholz]

Hi there,

I am using MTD/JFFS2 as root fs for my embedded system for some time now.
It was working fine.
But as my image grows bigger and bigger I get strange errors:

While booting Linux I get
...
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.
Inode #10 was a directory with children - removing those too...
Inode #11 was a directory with children - removing those too...
VFS: Mounted root (jffs2 filesystem).
Freeing unused kernel memory: 52k init
...

What does that mean?

Sometimes he's complaining about hardlinks.
Then for instance some links are not working correctly, i.e. power should be a
link to busybox but has size zero.

/etc/pcmcia should be a directory, but is a file containing garbage (i.e. some
text that should be in a file in this directory).

And what means:

~ # cat /etc/hosts 
Argh. Special inode #43 with mode 020600 had more than one node
cat: Input/output error

???

cat should be a link to busybox. But "ls /bin" does not show cat !

I am using linux-2.4.19 on a ppc platform.

Thanks very much!

Steven