Unfortunately this patch doesn't completely solve this problem, since
the system will still be hosed due to all memory being used up by
dentries.  And I bet the OOM killer won't find the real target (du)
but will kill anything before that.

So the second part of the problem is to somehow limit the number of
dentries used.  Not easy...

At least with this patch (if I am reading it correctly), once the offending
culprit is identified and the programs are killed off, everything will go
back to normal without a reboot.

Russ