Re: [PULL REQUEST] ext3, jbd, ext2, and quota fixes for 3.1-rc1

[Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 11:36:29AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> So I *really* want people to take a look at that ext3_sync_file()
> function. Please?

While we are at it, could somebody please explain what the hell is ext4
doing in
static int ext4_sync_parent(struct inode *inode)
{
        struct writeback_control wbc;
        struct dentry *dentry = NULL;
        int ret = 0;

        while (inode && ext4_test_inode_state(inode, EXT4_STATE_NEWENTRY)) {
                ext4_clear_inode_state(inode, EXT4_STATE_NEWENTRY);
                dentry = list_entry(inode->i_dentry.next,
                                    struct dentry, d_alias);
                if (!dentry || !dentry->d_parent || !dentry->d_parent->d_inode)
                        break;
                inode = dentry->d_parent->d_inode;
                ret = sync_mapping_buffers(inode->i_mapping);
		...
Note that dentry obviously can't be NULL there.  dentry->d_parent is never
NULL.  And dentry->d_parent would better not be negative, for crying out
loud!  What's worse, there's no guarantees that dentry->d_parent will
remain our parent over that sync_mapping_buffers() *and* that inode won't
just be freed under us (after rename() and memory pressure leading to
eviction of what used to be our dentry->d_parent).  Moreover, even if
inode survives in icache, there is no promise that it will have an alias
in dcache by the time we get to the next iteration of the loop, so this
list_entry() next time around can bloody well happen to &inode->i_dentry,
dentry being a garbage address somewhere inside that struct inode (or a
bit above it - I hadn't compared offsets).

What the hell is going on there?  It appeared more than a year ago in commit
14ece1028b3ed53ffec1b1213ffc6acaf79ad77c
Author: Frank Mayhar <fmayhar@google.com>
Date:   Mon May 17 08:00:00 2010 -0400
ext4: Make fsync sync new parent directories in no-journal mode

and it had remained broken ever after...