Re: [PATCH] jbd2: gracefully abort instead of panicking on unlocked buffer

[Milos Nikic <nikic.milos@gmail.com>]

Hi Jan,

No, I didn't trigger this in the wild. I have been auditing jbd2 for J_ASSERT usage to see where we could proactively swap hard panics for graceful journal aborts. 

You are right that there are many similar asserts, but I focused on this one because it belongs to a specific, easily-actionable group: it resides in a function that already returns an error code (int). 

Some of the other J_ASSERTs are buried inside void functions. Converting those to return errors would require cascading API changes and rewriting caller error-handling paths across the subsystem, which is a much bigger and riskier lift.

My goal was just to target the "low-hanging fruit" - the asserts where the function signature already supports returning an error (-EINVAL/-EIO) and aborting the journal safely without changing the API.

If you are open to it, I can audit the codebase for the rest of the asserts that fit this exact profile and submit them. Would you prefer them grouped into a single patch, or a short series?

Thanks,
Milos